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How quickly should communication robots respond?

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports a study about system response time (SRT) in communication robots that utilize human-like social features, such as anthropomorphic appearance and conversation in natural language. Our research purpose established a design guideline for SRT in communication robots. The first experiment observed user preferences toward different SRTs in interaction with a robot. In other existing user interfaces, faster response is usually preferred. In contrast, our experimental result indicated that user preference for SRT in a communication robot is highest at one second, and user preference ratings level off at two seconds.
However, a robot cannot always respond in such a short time as one or two seconds. Thus, the important question is "What should a robot do if it cannot respond quickly enough?" The second experiment tested the effectiveness of a conversational filler: behavior to notify listeners that the robot is going to respond. In Japanese "etto" is used to buy time to think and resembles "well..." and "uh..." In English. We used the same strategy in a communication robot to shadow system response time. Our results indicated that using a conversational filler by the robot moderated the user's impression toward a long SRT.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '08: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
March 2008
402 pages
ISBN:9781605580173
DOI:10.1145/1349822
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 March 2008

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Author Tags

  1. communication robots
  2. conversational filler
  3. system response time

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HRI '08
HRI '08: International Conference on Human Robot Interaction
March 12 - 15, 2008
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Evaluation of Prosodic Features Suitable for Conversational Agents Replying with a JokeJournal of Information Processing10.2197/ipsjjip.32.3532(35-40)Online publication date: 2024
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