Thread by @mich_ptaszynski

🚨 The Uncanny Valley doesn't exist. 🚨

Mujahid Khalifah in his PhD research just showed that Japanese emotional speech models created from artificial voice datasets match original data in emotional expression.

What are the implications? 🧵

doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS…

You do not need to collect huge high quality datasets for each emotion to produce a good emotional voice. Just use a raw voice model and fine-tune it for specific emotion(s) on small emotional data - even artificial data (!). The emotions will still be perfectly understandable.

Whats more, you can just train a voice model from scratch only on artificial data - it will be worse, but still perfectly usable (!).

This result for Japanese language holds up for basically all age groups, genders, nationalities, even for people who don't know Japanese (!).

This also confirms my own theory.
It shows that when people obtain a new technology, (1) they already know the technology a bit and (2) prefer to smoothly adopt it, focusing on its overall utility rather than minor imperfections.

Thus - the theory of Uncanny Valley is incorrect.

And if you think of it, it's actually quite obvious. Technology is always developing, so by the time there actually are life-like humanoid robots to use at home, we will be well acquainted with them not to feel uncanny with them (although spoiler - its pure sci-fi AI-robot-hype).

So - Mori was wrong in his "The Uncanny Valley" paper. It seems he was imagining things from his own perspective, rather than taking into account the progress of technology and society.
But, on the bright side - your next Siri will be more naturally emotional. ☺️

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