Social Responses of a Robotic Salesperson Based on the Engagement of Visitors

Abstract

In recent years, customer service robots have been rapidly deployed. However, it is still unclear what kind of behavior is effective for sale. A conversation cannot be initiated, if the customers are not interested in the robot. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on engagement in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In order to produce socially intelligent responses, we introduce a machine learning method to calculate a degree of engagement by analyzing the data which we conducted a field experiment in a real shop. As a result, we develop a model that the robot can hence decide on a socially intelligent response in the start of the conversation.