Speaking with kAIxo

The final presentation of the „kAIxo“ project took place on January 9, 2025. Nicolas Lluis Araya was the project team member. The FHNW School of Business has been developing chatbots for dead, endangered, and extinct languages for several years. A well-known example is @llegra, a chatbot for Vallader. In the spring of 2024, Oliver Bendel tested the reach of GPTs for endangered languages such as Irish (Irish Gaelic), Maori, and Basque. According to ChatGPT, there is a relatively large amount of training material for them. On May 12, 2024 – after Irish Girl and Maori Girl – a first version of Adelina, a chatbot for Basque, was created. It was later improved in a second version. As part of the „kAIxo“ project (the Basque “kaixo” corresponds to the English „hello“), the chatbot kAIxo was built, which speaks Basque. Its purpose is to keep users practicing written or spoken language or to develop the desire to learn the endangered language. The chatbot is based on GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Flash, and the user can select his or her preferred large language model (LLM). Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) plays a central role. The ChatSubs dataset is used, which contains subtitles of movie dialogs in Basque. Thanks to a text-to-speech engine, the chatbot can also speak. At the final presentation, Nicolas Lluis Araya presented a working prototype that can be accessed via www.kaixo.ch.

Fig.: Speaking with kAIxo

The Robot’s Love Affairs

PlayGround is a Spanish online magazine, founded in 2008, with a focus on culture, future and food. Astrid Otal asked the ethicist Oliver Bendel about the conference in London („Love and Sex with Robots“) and in general about sex robots and love dolls. One issue was: „In love, a person can suffer. But in this case, can robots make us suffer sentimentally?“ The reply to it: „Of course, they can make us suffer. By means of their body, body parts and limbs, and by means of their language capabilities. They can hurt us, they can kill us. They can offend us by using certain words and by telling the truth or the untruth. In my contribution for the conference proceedings, I ask this question: It is possible to be unfaithful to the human love partner with a sex robot, and can a man or a woman be jealous because of the robot’s other love affairs? We can imagine how suffering can emerge in this context … But robots can also make us happy. Some years ago, we developed the GOODBOT, a chatbot which can detect problems of the user and escalate on several levels. On the highest level, it hands over an emergency number. It knows its limits.“ Some statements of the interview have been incorporated in the article „Última parada: después del sexo con autómatas, casarse con un Robot“ (February 11, 2017) which is available via www.playgroundmag.net/futuro/sexo-robots-matrimonio-legal-2050-realdolls_0_1918608121.html.

Fig.: What about the robot’s love affairs?