Hey Haru, Let's Be Friends! Using the Tiers of Friendship to Build Rapport through Small Talk with the Tabletop Robot Haru

Nichols, Eric; Siskind, Sarah Rose; Ivanchuk, Levko; Pérez, Guillermo Martínez; Kamino, Waki; Šabanović, Selma; Gómez, Randy

doi:10.1109/iros47612.2022.9981369

Cited by 2 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…We follow the protocol established by Nichols et al (2022a) for evaluating conversations with social robots: a video of a human interacting with the robot is filmed for each conversational strategy, and then human volunteers watch the videos and answer a series of survey questions about its content. In this section, we describe the evaluation method in detail.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following power analysis, we collected survey responses with the goal of exceeding participants. A university with an established history of evaluating conversations with social robots ( Nichols et al, 2021a ; Nichols et al 2022a ; Nichols et al 2023 ) was used to recruit survey participants and conduct the survey.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Haru’s range of communicative strategies positions the robot as a potent embodied communication agent capable of long-term interaction with people. Haru has been deployed in a variety of scenarios, including classroom companion, interactive storyteller ( Nichols et al, 2021a ), and, of course, conversational partner ( Nichols et al, 2022a ).…”

Section: Target Robot and Dialogue Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many notable conversational agents today are chatbots where the user is expected to prompt the bot with a query and receive a response from a generic and neutral character. But a conversational agent that initiates and guides a user through an interaction may, if given a distinct character, be perceived as far more memorable, likable, and awe-inspiring ( Nichols et al, 2022a ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Would you be impressed: applying principles of magic to chatbot conversations

Siskind,

Nichols,

Gomez

2024

Front. Robot. AI

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A magician’s trick and a chatbot conversation have something in common: most of their audiences do not know how they work. Both are also constrained by their own limitations: magicians by the constraints of biology and physics, and dialogue systems by the status of current technology. Magicians and chatbot creators also share a goal: they want to engage their audience. But magicians, unlike the designers of dialogue systems, have centuries of practice in gracefully skirting limitations in order to engage their audience and enhance a sense of awe. In this paper, we look at these practices and identify several key principles of magic and psychology to apply to conversations between chatbots and humans. We formulate a model of communication centered on controlling the user’s attention, expectations, decisions, and memory based on examples from the history of magic. We apply these magic principles to real-world conversations between humans and a social robot and evaluate their effectiveness in a Magical conversation setting compared to a Control conversation that does not incorporate magic principles. We find that human evaluators preferred interactions that incorporated magical principles over interactions that did not. In particular, magical interactions increased 1) the personalization of experience, 2) user engagement, and 3) character likability. Firstly, the magical experience was “personalized.” According to survey results, the magical conversation demonstrated a statistically significant increase in “emotional connection” and “robot familiarity.” Therefore, the personalization of the experience leads to higher levels of perceived impressiveness and emotional connection. Secondly, in the Magical conversation, we find that the human interlocutor is perceived to have statistically-significantly higher engagement levels in four of seven characteristics. Thirdly, participants judged the robot in the magical conversation to have a significantly greater degree of “energeticness,”“humorousness,” and “interestingness.” Finally, evaluation of the conversations with questions intended to measure contribution of the magical principals showed statistically-significant differences for five out of nine principles, indicating a positive contribution of the magical principles to the perceived conversation experience. Overall, our evaluation demonstrates that the psychological principles underlying a magician’s showmanship can be applied to the design of conversational systems to achieve more personalized, engaging, and fun interactions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Target Robot and Dialogue Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Would you be impressed: applying principles of magic to chatbot conversations

Siskind,

Nichols,

Gomez

2024

Front. Robot. AI

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The dialogue structure is then loaded into behavior trees, with all the components interacting with the robot hardware using ROS [27]. This system, which combines off-the-shelf components with custom robot elements, was previously tested in other applications [28], such as small talk scenarios and hospital dialogues.…”

Section: Social Robotmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Autonomous Robot-Mediated Behavior Coaching Sessions with Haru

Jelínek,

Nichols,

Gomez

2024

Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

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This study presents an empirical investigation into the design and impact of autonomous dialogues in human-robot interaction for behavior change coaching. We focus on the use of Haru, a tabletop social robot, and explore the implementation of the Tiny Habits method [13] for fostering positive behavior change. The core of our study lies in developing a fully autonomous dialogue system that maximizes Haru's emotional expressiveness and unique personality. Our methodology involved iterative design and extensive testing of the dialogue system, ensuring it effectively embodied the principles of the Tiny Habits method while also incorporating strategies for trust-raising and trust-dampening. The effectiveness of the final version of the dialogue was evaluated in an experimental study with human participants (N=12). The results indicated a significant improvement in perceptions of Haru's liveliness, interactivity, and neutrality. Additionally, our study contributes to the broader understanding of dialogue design in social robotics, offering practical insights for future developments in the field. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

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Hey Haru, Let's Be Friends! Using the Tiers of Friendship to Build Rapport through Small Talk with the Tabletop Robot Haru

Cited by 2 publications

References 27 publications

Would you be impressed: applying principles of magic to chatbot conversations

Would you be impressed: applying principles of magic to chatbot conversations

Developing Autonomous Robot-Mediated Behavior Coaching Sessions with Haru

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