A Robot Avatar Expressing Users’ Presence by Reflection of Their Typing Behavior in Text Communication

Abstract

Recently, online text-based chat communication has become widely used. However, the often-used text chat tools make it hard to feel the presence of the chat partner because of the lack of nonverbal cues conveyed in face-to-face communication, such as nods and facial expressions. This study aims to establish a style of conveying nonverbal cues to the chat partners by a robot avatar and to express the presence of text chat. Therefore, we focused on users’ typing behavior to create messages on text chat. We extract nonverbal cues from their typing behavior and reflect them in the behavior of a robot avatar. In this paper, we defined user states, such as speaking and listening, based on users’ mutual typing behavior and proposed a chat system using a robot avatar to express these states. The evaluation experiment of the proposed system suggested that reflecting chat users’ typing behavior on their robot avatar can express their presence.