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For enhanced performance and privacy, companies deploying voice-activated technologies such as virtual assistants and robots are increasingly tending toward designs in which technologies only begin attending to speech once a specified wakeword is heard. Due to concerns that interactions with such technologies could lead users, especially children, to develop impolite habits, some companies have begun to develop use modes in which interactants are required to use ostensibly polite wakewords such as " Please''. In this paper, we argue that these ``please-centering'' wakewords are likely to backfire and actually discourage polite interactions due to the particular types of lexical and syntactic priming induced by those wakewords. We then present the results of a human-subject experiment (n=90) that validates those claims.
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Fresh Start: Encouraging Politeness in Wakeword-Driven Human-Robot Interaction
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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- PAR ID:
- 10403579
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 112 to 121
- 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
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3568162.3576959
