Cooperative Use of Multiple Robots for Enhancing Sense of Conversation without Voice Recognition

Abstract

Due to the difficulties in voice recognition and natural language processing, it has been difficult for us to keep having a sufficient sense of conversation with a conversation robot. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that we can make conversation between human and a robot without voice recognition by carefully designing the script for robot's utterances. However, it is difficult for a single robot to escape from collapse of conversation when the prepared replies do not match with the user's utterances. This study focuses on how to escape such collapses by using multiple robots. Through comparing to a single robot that talks to human with the same script, it is suggested that the multiple robots can provide human with more sense of conversation than the single robot. It is argued that the effect originates from subject's experience of observing conversation and switches of speaker role between robots, which is specific in multiple conversation.