Why we feel distant from smart speakers? The role of the Japanese pronoun that creates intimacy with robots

Abstract

"Let's meet up at that station tomorrow!" For friends who are living together such information is enough to understand. This is because both people understand the relationships between them and repeat the answers or phrases based on such understanding. This makes people feel more close and familiar to each other. However, what if people talk to smart speaker instead? In that case they will do their best to speak as clear as possible in order to let everyone understand them. So people understand what information they are conveying. However, would not be their utterances make people feel more close and familiar despite personal agents? In this paper we propose and evaluated an interaction design that creates a sense of familiarity with smart speakers, based on conversations through the use of pronouns between people. We come to a conclusion that pronouns work in intimacy even in the scenes when the robot tells a schedule to humans.