Philosophy meets entertainment: Designing an interactive virtual philosopher

Abstract

To many people, philosophy seems to be a difficult and daunting subject. Our research seeks to make the esoteric philosophical ideas and concepts more accessible to people in the modern world, and make philosophy learning an entertaining activity by allowing people to directly interact with virtual philosophers from the past. With Artificial Intelligence technology, we have created a virtual philosopher that can automatically respond to user's input in natural language text. It is hoped that the added interactivity can help to increase the appeal of philosophical subject to the users, and the users can have a better idea of the philosophy after an entertaining experience talking with the virtual philosopher. In this paper, we share our considerations for designing the system, the system architecture, and our preliminary user study on the interaction with the virtual philosopher. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.