Valerie, the new receptionist at Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, can give you directions to labs and offices and she can give you an update about the weather. Yawn.

	Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Valerie, a robotic receptionist at Carnegie Mellon's Newell-Simon Hall -- "Ideally, we're going to get her to respond to people on a very human level," said Anne Mundell, an associate professor of drama. Click photo for larger image.

Or she can tell you about her date with a '58 Chevy Impala and complain that "my motherboard says I'm fat." But don't expect any tips about where to find a good pizza -- Valerie is a robot and robots don't eat.

Since taking up residence in the lobby of Newell-Simon Hall in November, Valerie has been the public face of the computer science department, an internationally recognized center for robotics research.

The "roboceptionist," which was introduced to the news media yesterday, also is a joint project of the computer science and drama departments, an attempt to build a robot that can entertain as well as inform.

"Ideally, we're going to get her to respond to people on a very human level," said Anne Mundell, an associate professor of drama, who leads the project along with Reid Simmons, a research professor in the Robotics Institute.

No one will mistake Valerie for a human and no staff member need fear that she will take his or her job. Her face is a cartoonish image projected on a flat-panel monitor, which sits atop a decidedly non-humanoid, cylindrical robotic body.

Visitors can identify themselves by swiping their driver's licenses or ID cards through her card reader and can communicate by tapping on a keyboard. Valerie responds vocally, her lips moving in sync with her monotone voice, while her words also appear in text balloons on the computer monitor. A tilt-and-pan head allows her to look her visitors in the eye.

Mundell's playwriting students have given her an edgy personality, a sometimes snippy attitude and a backstory that they hope will make people take interest in her and begin to regard her as more than just a bundle of wires, lights and plastic.

She has her limitations as an actor, noted Tara Meddaugh, a graduate playwriting student. For instance, Valerie has no arms. Everything must be communicated by facial expressions and words, with a minimum of movement.

Meddaugh and three other playwriting students struggled to find a consistent voice for Valerie ---- one that humans could relate to but that also was peculiar to a robot. Initially, she often seemed to have a sad tone, because she so often failed at her receptionist tasks. But they eventually embraced that underdog quality as something that would resonate with humans.

She still has difficulty carrying on a conversation but, boy, can she talk.

Consider her bad date with Vern the Vacuum, who took her to dinner at Carpet Emporium.

"When he wasn't ignoring me, he was trying to give me a hickey with his nozzle," she complained. "I mean, what kind of a robot does he think I am? A hickey is definitely a second-date event. It says so in the book I'm reading, 'A Robo-Woman's Guide to Mechanical Love.' "

She had better luck on her date with a baby blue Chevy Impala. "For our date, we went to a drive-in to see 'The Terminator.' The movie. Not the actual killer cyborg. ... It was very romantic ---- all that blood and technology!"

The early reviews surprised another playwright, Kevin Snipes. "They complained that she was a stereotypical receptionist," he said. "I couldn't imagine anyone saying Valerie was a stereotype."

The computer scientists helped keep Valerie's monologues technologically grounded, Simmons said. When the drama students were looking for the robotic equivalent of a manicure or a hair styling, they asked if she could say, "I got oiled today." But she doesn't use oil, the geeks protested. "So now she talks about having the dust blown out of her circuits."

Robotically speaking, Valerie doesn't break much new ground. "Robotics has gotten to the point that we can put it out there on a daily basis," Simmons said. "I don't think we've missed a day because of a mechanical or software problem."

The trick will be to get people to want to interact with Valerie. The goal is to keep her evolving, both in terms of capability and in terms of her backstory, so that she can become more useful while also holding the interest ---- and perhaps the affections ---- of people.

Though the Carnegie Mellon researchers say Valerie is the first storytelling receptionist robot, another robotic receptionist, named Inkha, went into operation late last year at King's College London. Rather than a graphical face, Inkha sports a mechanical head. When visitors punch a keyboard, she gives directions to classrooms, or provides weather updates and other information.

"The students love to interact with Inkha," said Matthew Walker, her co-creator, noting that students have pressed her buttons 4,800 times in 71 days. She, too, has a personality; she occasionally asks slovenly students if they got dressed in the dark and asks for a cup of tea when she's tired. "People do become attached to it."

But they also play pranks. Inkha used to be programmed to read e-mails, but after students used it to make Inkha swear, that feature was disconnected.

At Carnegie Mellon, Simmons said, "there's a tremendous amount of smart alecks," many of whom seem intent on breaking Valerie.

Of about 500 messages typed to Valerie each day, about a quarter involve pleasantries, another 20 percent are requests for information and another 10 percent are questions about her personal life. The rest are ... something else.

"She's had one marriage proposal," Mundell said.

"She's had a lot of proposals that were a lot lewder than marriage proposals," Simmons added.