Two is better than one: descriptions by multiple robots strengthen the feeling of kawaii toward objects

摘要

Using multiple robots in presentations more effectively attracts customers and provides information to them than a single robot. Many robotics researchers have employed this approach to achieve effective robot-presentation systems in real environments. Although these systems implicitly equalize the amount of speech in the conversational content among multiple robots, it remains unknown whether that strategy is actually important. For example, the effects of the second robot that provides only back-channel responses have not yet been investigated. Unveiling the relationships between the presentation effects and the amount of speech in multiple robot presentations is undoubtedly crucial for designing the content of multiple robots’ conversations. For this purpose, we conducted a video-based web-survey whose findings suggest that using multiple robots for product recommendations increases their commercial attractiveness. The results showed some advantages by equalizing the amount of speech compared to biasing that amount in presentations.