Artificial companions with personality and social role

Abstract

Robots and virtual characters are becoming increasingly used in our everyday life. Yet, they are still far from being able to maintain long-term social relationships with users. It also remains unclear what future users will expect from these so-called “artificial companions” in terms of social roles and personality. These questions are of importance because users will be surrounded with multiple artificial companions. These issues of social roles and personality among a group of companions are seldom tackled in user studies. In this paper, we describe a study in which 94 participants reported the social roles and personalities they would expect from groups of companions. We explain how the results give insights for the design of future groups of companions endowed with social intelligence.