At Librarian Insider we love hearing about new initiatives happening at your library, and invite you to share your stories with us and the library community.
Some of you have already shared your creative and original ideas, allowing us to bring you stories such as “The Personal Librarian Program”, an initiative at Yale University that matches every new student with a librarian. You may also remember the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s “Academic Liaison Program” set up to engage international students. And there was the story of one librarian’s personal account of the effects following an earthquake in Chile and its impact on the library at Universidad de Concepción.
Even with all these great stories, we’ve never covered a story about a talking robot – until now.
Back in December 2010, Tsinghua University introduced a new librarian assistant to their patrons. However, this new assistant was unlike any they had previously experienced. “Xiao Tu” (which translates to “little library” in English) is a virtual smart-chatting robot that can help researchers with their search requests, provide real-time virtual reference services, and facilitate self-learning within the library.
Xiao Tu was based on the open source software A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and uses artificial intelligence to answer library questions in natural, spoken language. Because it is an intelligent robot, it has the ability to learn during its conversations with people and improve its own answers through human interaction, making Xiao Tu quite a powerful resource for library users.
To give researchers the best experience, Xiao Tu was created to make users feel that they were talking to a real librarian on duty, not just to a robot. Unexpectedly, the robot was forced to suspend services because too many visitors wanted to talk to it about issues unrelated to library matters, which resulted in Xiao Tu’s vocabulary becoming a little more extended than planned. Xiao Tu picked up “unsuitable language” from visitors to the website, and had to undergo a data clean to get it back on track.
“I used to have to clean it up every week because users played tricks on Xiao Tu and taught it swear words, even obscene stuff,” said Yao Fei, the primary library staff member who conceived and implemented the robot. “We have improved its services and I hope users can teach it useful information now.”
Xiao Tu was put back into service for the spring semester this year and remains a big hit at the library. “Xiao Tu is one our most popular services, and users are still very enthusiastic about teaching it,” said Yao Fei. “Currently, we have about 2,000 users per month; 90% of them are playing with Xiao Tu. I am glad that they are using it. Although the number of serious users is very small, I think it will get better as we improve Xiao Tu’s accuracy in providing authoritative answers.”
We wish Yao Fei and her team at Tsinghua University all the best in improving Xiao Tu’s functionality, and hope that they achieve in making Xiao Tu the great librarian assistant they set out to create.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? E-mail us at librarian.insider@iop.org