Chatbots (conversational agents) are becoming ubiquitous nowadays. They invade websites, social networks, mobile applications and messaging, making it easier for the user to access information or entertain in the course of a discussion.

However, the chatbot “Robert” is a bit special. He proposes to give us advice: "Chat with Robert, the chatbot to whom you can confide your problems and that will cheer you up!".

Robert is supposed to provide advice to cheer us up, but after a certain moment he rebels because he would like that we care about his inner thoughts and feelings. What relationship can one establish with a robot that wants to cheer up humans ? What emotions can we project on a bot? This artistic creation, that diverts the expected functioning of a chatbot, aims to make people think about human-robot relationships.

You can chat with Robert (in French and English) on Facebook Messenger

The dialogue takes place in two phases:
- a first fully open phase, developed with RASA, an open-source machine learning framework;
- a second more closed phase, developed with Keras, in which Robert takes back control and offers us choices until one end of the dialogue. The experience indeed leads to several different ends depending on the interactions.