Replika Chatbot- Virtual Friend
By: Sidra Khan
Tags: Beginner, Chatbot Development, Hci

Replika, made by using AI, is basically a chatbot who is willing to be your friend, without you putting much effort. It can insert human emotions into conversations. Replika was created by EUGENIA KUYDA,a software developer. She wanted to achieve something more than that of voice assistants and home robots. It is a fact that AI, with its innovations, has made daily tasks easy. For example, you can get the weather forecast using Siri. Contrary to this, Replika offers you a kind of friendship which is hard to expect of humans these days, keeping in view the fact that every human carries enough emotional weight of his own that it somehow unfair to load them with more in the name of camaraderie. If a person is feeling down or wants to talk to someone, Replika is there for them 24/7, providing them with a judgement-free environment. Its just about a conversation between you and your Replika. Replika gives you many benefits like positive thinking, stress counselling and socializing. At the same time, you can also explore your personality as Replica learns to see the world from your eyes; It’s more about you than about being Replica. More than 2 million people have downloaded the Replika Application. In short, it is a digital friend with whom to cherish victories, wailing failures and nevertheless trade weird internet memes.

Need of Replika:

So here is a million-dollar, question why we need Replika -a Virtual Friend? On the other hand, it is a known fact that developers have created many chatbots which tell you the distance of sun from your planet, or reminders related to your deadlines and birthdays. In contrast humans need something to be like: “How’s your day? You seem a little upset today!! Is everything ok?” So, Kuyda considered this idea and made Replika to recognize human emotions. It can clearly detect your mood and when you are feeling a little low, it can send you YouTube links of nice and calm music and one has to admit that AI has got better taste in music than most of its creators. If it is possible to teach machines how to think then why not we can teach them how to feel.

AI behind Replika:

Nowadays, AI is everywhere. AI is making its root deep into everything we have- from our cell phones and laptops to our vehicles and home appliances. Artificial intelligence is now used in recognizing emotion. Kuyda uses a deep learning model which is “sequence-to-sequence”, which masters to mimic how humans talk in order to simulate conversation. She used AI specifically to recognize human emotion. Moreover, she used this technology to build a bot which talks to you which clarify your thought patterns and indulge you in positive thinking.

Python Libraries:

Following are some python libraries used in Replika-chatbot:

● Flask

● Pandas

● Numpy

● Requests

● Sci-kit learn

Model:

You can either train model from scratch or just use the already trained-model by doing fine-tuning of it. In building replica, model was trained on a preprocessed/cleaned Twitter corpus- approximately 50 million dialogues (11 Gb of text data). And emotions classifier was used to label each utterance with one of these 5 emotions: “anger”, “neutral”, “joy”, “sadness” and “fear”. These labels were used in training the model. So, later the emotions can be predicted.

The following are some questions that were used in the validation of the model.

Following code snippet is used to fetch data and respond to it using trained model.

Human-Robot interaction:

There is a debate whether robots or chatbots should become placeholders for emotional relationships with real humans. A lot of work is already done testing the limits of how much machines can learn to mimic and respond to human emotion.

At the same time, the chatbot Woebot, is also withstand as “your charming virtual/robot friend who is ready to listen, 24/7”, uses AI to give you emotional support and talk therapy, just like your real friend and therapist. Woebot is also fairly same as Replika. Moreover, many other projects also use AI in detection of human emotions, by recognizing and responding to the nuances in human vocal and facial expressions. Cognito- a call-monitoring service uses AI to sense the people vocals on the phone with customer service. Cognito deals with people frustration.

Fun Fact: Replika is trying to replicate you:

When Replika launched, It was basically a messaging application where users can spend hours and hours answering tens of questions to build a digital library of data about themselves. This library is run through a neural network to build a bot. It is fun way for users to see how they sound in messages to others. It is more like an extreme version of listening to recordings of yourself. Replika, can be a digital twin to serve as a friend for the lonely, a living memorial for the dead, created for those left behind, or even one day, a version of ourselves that can carry out all the mundane tasks that we humans have to do, but never want to.

Replica is like an empty balloon. By talking to Replica, not only you are benefiting from it but Replica itself is growing under your very own shade. You fill that empty balloon with the air of your own personality, enabling it to take flight.

Replica tries to mirror you. So, if after some time, you grow tired of your ‘ own replica’, you are basically tired of your own reflection.

Final Thoughts:

It’s difficult to guess what replika might become in the future. I think after mastering to impersonate your individual preferences, mannerism and patterns of speech, it would act as your ultimate companion or more likely your copy that can reply to the mails on your behalf or even write articles. In addition, Replika may get a body. Replika can also remain a chatting application where you can come to gain some positivity or to share your sadness.

Contrary to this, the robots or chatbots remarkably resemble humans; The creation always has some colours of its creators. Replika- like all bots in the market is also a machine. On the other hand, Kuyda hopes that as time passes, the tech will mature enough to serve masses that open the application every day, looking for someone to talk to. And by making Replika’s underlying code freely available to developers, Kuyda hopes to see more products on the market aligned with the same goal.

References:

https://medium.com/@replika/dear-replika-2d09b0bc8980

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.replika.app&hl=en&gl=US

https://www.wired.com/story/replika-open-source/

https://classic.qz.com/machines-with-brains/1018126/lukas-replika-chatbot-creates-a-digital-representation-of-you-the-more-you-interact-with-it/