What Can You Say to a Robot? Capability Communication Leads to More Natural Conversations

TL;DR

This study shows that robots proactively communicating their capabilities lead to more natural, enjoyable conversations and influence user behavior positively during interactions.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates proactive capability communication strategies in robots, demonstrating their impact on user experience and interaction style.

Findings

Proactive communication improves user ratings and enjoyment.

Users adopt more conversational behavior with proactive robots.

Proactive strategies lead to more natural interactions.

Abstract

When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without additional effort to make sure the user understands what happened. We set out to compare the effect of two speech based capability communication strategies (proactive, reactive) to a robot without such a strategy, in regard to the user's rating of and their behavior during the interaction. For this, we conducted an in-person user study with 120 participants who had three speech-based interactions with a social robot in a restaurant setting. Our results suggest that users preferred the robot communicating its capabilities proactively and adjusted their behavior in those interactions, using a more conversational interaction style while also enjoying the interaction more.