How quickly should communication robots respond?

Abstract

Time Figure 1: Robot performs conversational fillers to buy time That one! Oh, this one. OK, I'll bring it later.etto... 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. 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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. This aspect contrasts with a traditional human interface, since SRTs less than a second are preferred in user interfaces [7][8] [9].

Extensive assessment and evaluation methodologies on assistive social robots for modelling human–robot interaction – A review

“…There are a variety of tools available for HRI researchers seeking to assess aspects of the societal acceptance of robots [48,131]. From most past researchers done to assess the societal acceptance of robots, there include: (1) ethnographic observation [38], (2) system response-time analysis [153], (3) common ground analysis [161], (4) embodiment measurement [29], (5) perceived enjoyment analysis [59], (6) comfort level analysis [95], (7) interaction profile analysis [133], and others [48,131]. For people to accept robots in social contexts, it is important Fig.10(a).…”

“…This needs a type of modelling, which is always known as the Technology Acceptance Modelling (TAM) [20,21,23,55,57,61,63,135]. Nowadays, significant increase in the elderly population and the increased shortage of labour, as well as the explosion of costs in our daily expenses, have posed extreme challenges to our society [55,61,63,152]. However, how many research projects can explore the applicability of technological advances such as Intelligent Systems that enable people to live independently?…”

Capturing Expertise: Developing Interaction Content for a Robot Through Teleoperation by Domain Experts

“…Studies have shown that the length of natural pauses in human dialogue ranges from 0.62 to 0.77 s [37], and that delays longer than 2 s during human-robot interaction make people feel frustrated [38]. In teleoperation, an operator requires time to search through content or type utterances, so it can be difficult to respond so quickly [39].…”

“…When the operator is slow in choosing or typing a behavior, the system helps to fill the delay by automatically inserting conversational fillers such as "hmm…" or "please wait a moment" to avoid awkward silences [38]. Details about our implementation of this feature are explained in Sect.…”

Field Trial of a Networked Robot at a Train Station

“…We believe that a conversational filler behavior is useful to reduce such negative feelings [29]. In Japanese "etto" is used to buy time and resembles "well.…”