Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals In a world where talking toasters and chatting cars are moving from sci-fi into real life, the University of Potsdam has thrown a linguistic curveball. Yes, the future is here, and it's asking: "Sprechen Sie Dialect?" Lead researcher Katharina Kühne and her band of merry scientists decided to delve into the perplexing world of …
if the study participents found an Austrian dialect more trustworthy or authorative than either standard german or the Berlin dialect.
Queen's german - sorry I didn't quite get it other than by analogy with the (late) Queen's english. Kaiserin Deutsch doesn't seem to ring any bells. All the historical Kaiserinnen were consorts unlike ERII so would have been Kaisers Deutsch I imagine.
Just struck me that VRI spoke German en famille and I believe retained an accent.
Robots sounding competent is currently a problem for multiple reasons. I would prefer them to sound daft so when the GPS says "At the level crossing turn left" some people would go straight on instead. Some presidents trained in sounding thick so some voters would think "he is too stupid to lie". Email scam spammers sound stupid to avoid wasting their time with people smart enough not to convert their pensions to gold and hand it over to a courier.
'"If you're good at speaking a dialect, you're more likely to trust a robot that talks the same way," said Kühne." It seems people trust the robot more because they find a similarity." '
This is an absolute truism in social science if it's interpreted as 'people tend to preferentially trust those who speak the same dialect' (an indicator of belonging to the same social circle). So what this astounding finding has to do specifically with AI or robots remains to be revealed.
I quote from the paper: "Discussion: Our results inform the design of social robots and emphasize the importance of device control in online experiments, but clearly they ascribe no importance to experimental control as there was no control group using human to human interaction to see whether interaction with the robot or AI as opposed to a person makes any significant difference. So this looks very like a piece of "we got another AI paper published!" research.
Germany has been a republic for over a hundred years -clue's in the full name.
The equivalent of "the Queen's English" would be Hochdeutsch, High German.
The most neutral sounding German would be that as spoken around Hannover.
Berliner Schautze isn't purely about the Berlin/Brandenburg dialect (descended from Low German), or local idioms, bur how the language is used: short, direct, brutally honest, and without superfluous flourishes.
In fairness, humor is something Germans notoriously struggle with
I know you're not being serious obviously, but it's a funny one (ha!) that. There's certainly differences in humour but you'd expect that in any culture.
Their language has a word that means "joy in other's misfortune", ie the basis of slapstick. Satire is popular (and often well done), stemming from Germany's cabaret tradition. British comedy, including classics like Monty Python, is also very popular.
They perhaps do tend (making a gross generalisation here obviously) to compartmentalise and remain serious with serious subjects (though see satire above).
<shrug>
I recognised the attempt, but decided, particularly in light of the relevant cultural stereotypes, to play it straight :-) .Hence the icon.
I was watching a band touring from the US in a bar in Germany, and they had to pause due to a technical difficulty (broken guitar string IIRC). Slightly awkwardly trying to fill the time, the lead singer asked the audience (in English) : "Does anyone know any jokes in German?". I instantly replied, in a straight somewhat monotone voice "There are no jokes in German". The people in my vicinity (all Germans) laughed. The singer, ironically enough, didn't get the joke. Mind you, having an unplanned pause when performing in a country where you don't speak the language is probably enough to give most musicians nightmares.
I remember the Dr Who episode where the Daleks had stolen the Earth as part of a plan to destroy everything in the universe.
Daleks were flying around various areas speaking different human languages.
The ones flying over Germany just sounded cool.
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