Meet A.L.Ex, Improbotics's comedy robot

Comedy and robots are joining forces under Improbotics. Meet A.L.Ex, an improv comedy robot brought to #FortuneAILondon.

Transcript

00:00Hello, meet my friend Alex. Alex is an improv comedy robot. It is basically a stage presence

00:07to bring on stage alongside human actors to do improvised theater and to explore different ways

00:15of connecting between humans and also between humans and machines for comedy. The robot has

00:20a personality that we create for it. So of course it's all about the prompting, all about the

00:25language model that we're using, but it's also about the reactions of the other actors on stage

00:30who interact with the robot and who create collectively that personality for Alex. Working

00:35with Alex has not always been very easy, to be honest. Once, it was in 2017, we had a very difficult

00:42show where everything went wrong, including Alex, who literally burst in flames. A servo was overheating.

00:49So, the reviewer came on that day and they said, never work with robots. Did we listen? Absolutely not.