Conversations with Andrea: Visitors' Opinions on Android Robots in a Museum

TL;DR

This study evaluates visitors' opinions on an autonomous android robot in a museum, revealing preferences for information roles and desired improvements based on real-world interactions.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into visitor perceptions and preferences for android robots in a museum setting, informing future robot design and deployment.

Findings

Most visitors want the robot to provide exhibit information.

Changing the robot's gender cues had little impact on perception.

Visitors requested multilingual support and faster responses.

Abstract

The android robot Andrea was set up at a public museum in Germany for six consecutive days to have conversations with visitors, fully autonomously. No specific context was given, so visitors could state their opinions regarding possible use-cases in structured interviews, without any bias. Additionally the 44 interviewees were asked for their general opinions of the robot, their reasons (not) to interact with it and necessary improvements for future use. The android's voice and wig were changed between different days of operation to give varying cues regarding its gender. This did not have a significant impact on the positive overall perception of the robot. Most visitors want the robot to provide information about exhibits in the future, while opinions on other roles, like a receptionist, were both wanted and explicitly not wanted by different visitors. Speaking more languages (than only English) and faster response times were the improvements most desired. These findings from the interviews are in line with an analysis of the system logs, which revealed, that after chitchat and personal questions, most of the 4436 collected requests asked for information related to the museum and to converse in a different language. The valuable insights gained from these real-world interactions are now used to improve the system to become a useful real-world application.