Effects of Robot Avatar Gestures on Communication via Anonymous SNS

Abstract

Text-based chat communication via anonymous Social Networking Services (SNS) has been widespread with the development of the Internet. Many people prefer communication via anonymous SNS because the idea of online disclosure of personal individual information is dangerous. Text-based chat communication is easy. However, since only text information exchanged, text-based chat communication has poor expressiveness and tends to ambiguous in utterance intention. Therefore, this paper proposes a robot avatar that performs gestures expressing dialogue acts. In the evaluation experiment of a conversation partner's impression, the friendliness of the conversation partner significantly lower than the robot's impression due to robot avatar without gestures. Furthermore, by the robot avatar performing gesture, the friendliness of a conversation partner significantly upper and the impressions of the robot and conversation partner were similar. It was also confirmed that the social telepresence of a conversation partner was enhanced by the physical embodiment of an avatar.