Receptionist or information kiosk: how do people talk with a robot?

The schema or mental structures that people apply towards other people has been shown to influence the way people cooperate with others. Schemas evoke behavioral scripts. In this paper, we explore two different scripts, receptionist and information kiosk, that we propose channeled visitors’ interactions with an interactive robot. We analyzed visitors’ verbal responses to a receptionist robot in a university building. Half of the visitors greeted the robot (e.g., “hello”) prior to interacting with it. Greeting the robot significantly predicted a more social script: more relational conversational strategies such as sociable interaction and politeness, attention to the robot’s narrated stories, selfdisclosure, and less negative/rude behaviors. The findings suggest people’s first words can predict their schematic orientation to an agent, thus making it possible to design agents that adapt to individuals at the outset of an interaction. We propose designs for interactive comput...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: Min Kyung Lee, Sara B. Kiesler, Jodi Forlizzi
• Keywords: CSCW 2010, Receptionist Robot, Robot, Robot’s Narrated Stories, Social Sciences