Deployed social robots are increasingly relying on wakeword-based interaction, where interactions are human-initiated by a wakeword like “Hey Jibo”. While wakewords help to increase speech recognition accuracy and ensure privacy, there is concern that wakeword-driven interaction could encourage impolite behavior because wakeword-driven speech is typically phrased as commands. To address these concerns, companies have sought to use wake- word design to encourage interactant politeness, through wakewords like “⟨Name⟩, please”. But while this solution is intended to encourage people to use more “polite words”, researchers have found that these wakeword designs actually decrease interactant politeness in text-based communication, and that other wakeword designs could better encourage politeness by priming users to use Indirect Speech Acts. Yet there has been no previous research to directly compare these wakewords designs in in-person, voice-based human-robot interaction experiments, and previous in-person HRI studies could not effectively study carryover of wakeword-driven politeness and impoliteness into human-human interactions. In this work, we conceptually reproduced these previous studies (n=69) to assess how the wakewords “Hey ⟨Name⟩”, “Excuse me ⟨Name⟩”, and “⟨Name⟩, please” impact robot-directed and human-directed politeness. Our results demonstrate the ways that different types of linguistic priming interact in nuanced ways to induce different types of robot-directed and human-directed politeness.
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Connecting the Dots of Social Robot Design From Interviews With Robot Creators
Despite promises about the near-term potential of social robots to share our daily lives, they remain unable to form autonomous, lasting, and engaging relationships with humans. Many companies are deploying social robots into the consumer and commercial market; however, both the companies and their products are relatively short lived for many reasons. For example, current social robots succeed in interacting with humans only within controlled environments, such as research labs, and for short time periods since longer interactions tend to provoke user disengagement. We interviewed 13 roboticists from robot manufacturing companies and research labs to delve deeper into the design process for social robots and unearth the many challenges robot creators face. Our research questions were: 1) What are the different design processes for creating social robots? 2) How are users involved in the design of social robots? 3) How are teams of robot creators constituted? Our qualitative investigation showed that varied design practices are applied when creating social robots but no consensus exists about an optimal or standard one. Results revealed that users have different degrees of involvement in the robot creation process, from no involvement to being a central part of robot development. Results also uncovered the need for multidisciplinary and international teams to work together to create robots. Drawing upon these insights, we identified implications for the field of Human-Robot Interaction that can shape the creation of best practices for social robot design.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734100
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10386128
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Robotics and AI
- Volume:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2296-9144
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.720799
