Ever wondered why your virtual（虚拟的）home helper doesn't understand your questions? Or why your navigation app took you on the side street instead of the highway? In a study published April 21st in the journal iScience, Italian researchers, Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella, designed a robot that “thinks out loud”.

To explore how inner speech might influence a robot’s actions, the researchers built a robot called Pepper that speaks to itself. It has the ability to reason and think. They then asked people to set the dinner table with Pepper according to etiquette（礼仪）rules. In one experiment, the user asked Pepper to lay the napkin at the wrong place, going against the rules. Pepper started asking itself a series of self-directed questions and concluded that the user might be mistaken. To be sure, Pepper confirmed the user’s order, which led to further inner speech.

“Ehm, this situation troubles me. I would never break the rules, but I can’t make the user unhappy, so I’m doing what he wants,” Pepper said to itself, laying the napkin where it was required to be. Through Pepper’s inner voice, the user can learn Pepper was facing a difficult situation and solved it by prioritizing the user’s order.

Comparing Pepper’s actions with and without inner speech, Pipitone and Chella discovered the robot had a higher task-completion rate when having self-dialogue.

However, some people find the robot spends more time completing tasks when it talks to itself. The robot’s inner speech is also limited to the knowledge that researchers gave it. Pepper’s designers still say their work provides a framework（构架）to further explore how self-dialogue can help robots focus, plan, and learn. “In some ways, we are creating a generational（世代的）robot that likes to chat. From navigation apps and the camera on your phone to medical robots in the operation rooms, machines and computers alike can take advantage of this chatty feature,” says Chella.

Before we upload a photo of ourselves to social media, like WeChat, we’ll use an app to smooth our skin, make our eyes look bigger, and give us longer eyelashes and fuller lips. With a couple of touches on our mobile phone, we’re able to present the best pictures of ourselves to others. However, the problem is, when we simply edit our imperfections（瑕疵） away, we’re also changing the way we look at our ourselves. ①_________

Last month, researchers from the US Boston University published an article Selfies —Living in the Era of Filtered（滤镜） Photographs. The article listed the bad effects of photo editing on people and the possibility to cause appearance worries. ②_________ The researchers think that these apps make it difficult to tell between reality and fantasy（虚幻）. “These apps allow one to change his or her appearance in minutes and follow an unrealistic standard of beauty,” the article says. ③_________

In the past, people might compare their looks to those who were famous that time. But for today’s young people, beauty standards are most likely set by what they see on social media. “From birth, they are born into an age of social platforms, and their feelings are connected to how good they look,” a British doctor Escho said.

④________ “Now you’ve got the comparison of your real self to fake self that you present on social media,” Renee Engeln, a professor at Northwestern University, told the Huff Post website. He further pointed out that when people spend too much time comparing with others, they may become “beauty sick” and find it difficult to accept what they actually look like.

So when we look in a real mirror, we shouldn’t think to ourselves, “Do I look as good as myself in the Beauty Cam（美颜）?” Instead, we should think, “I feel good, I have my health.”

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