Spoken Dialogue Strategy Focusing on Asymmetric Communication with Android Robots

TL;DR

This paper explores asymmetric communication strategies in human-android robot interactions, focusing on dialogue tactics and adaptive character expressions to enhance engagement and realism.

Contribution

It introduces novel dialogue strategies and character adaptation techniques to address asymmetry in human-android robot communication.

Findings

Use of tricky phrases increased engagement

Character expression changes improved realism

Asymmetric strategies showed potential in dialogues

Abstract

Humans are easily conscious of small differences in an android robot's (AR's) behaviors and utterances, resulting in treating the AR as not-human, while ARs treat us as humans. Thus, there exists asymmetric communication between ARs and humans. In our system at Dialogue Robot Competition 2022, this asymmetry was a considerable research target in our dialogue strategy. For example, tricky phrases such as questions related to personal matters and forceful requests for agreement were experimentally used in AR's utterances. We assumed that these AR phrases would have a reasonable chance of success, although humans would likely hesitate to use the phrases. Additionally, during a five-minute dialogue, our AR's character, such as its voice tones and sentence expressions, changed from mechanical to human-like type in order to pretend to tailor to customers. The characteristics of the AR developed by our team, DSML-TDU, are introduced in this paper.