A Study on the Amount of Speech in Partner Robots for Purposeless Walking

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the amount of speech of a robot that becomes a walking partner with a person on a purposeless walk. The control of the volume of speech is a factor that contributes greatly to the impression of the listener on the speaker and on the conversation itself. In walks, it is very important to obtain knowledge about the amount of utterance, because the conversation with the partner who walks with them contributes to the impression of the walk itself. In this paper, we conducted an intra-participant verification experiment with four kinds of speech volume, and investigated the sensation of more or less speech volume and the change of impressions with speech volume. The results showed that the amount of utterance was felt to be more when the time between the start of the utterance and the start of the next utterance was 10 seconds and less when the time was 40 seconds in a short sentence of 4–5 seconds. When the time between the start of one utterance and the start of the next was less than 20 seconds, they rated significantly higher for the other conditions in terms of their reputation as a walking partner, their likability, and their impression of whether they were intelligent or not.