TV-watching partner robot: Analysis of User's Experience

Abstract: Watching TV not only provides news information but also gives an opportunity for different generations to communicate. With the proliferation of smartphones, PC, and the Internet, increase the opportunities for communication in front of the television is also likely to diminish. This has led to some problems further from face-to-face such as a lack of self-control and insufficient development of communication skills. This paper proposes a TV-watching companion robot with open-domain chat ability. The robot contains two modes: TV-watching mode and conversation mode. In TV-watching mode, the robot first extracts keywords from the TV program and then generates the disclosure utterances based on the extracted keywords as if enjoying the TV program. In the conversation mode, the robot generates question utterances with keywords in the same way and then employs a topics-based dialog management method consisting of multiple dialog engines for rich conversations related to the TV program. We conduct the initial experiments and the result shows that all participants from the three groups enjoyed talking with the robot, and the question about their interests in the robot was rated 6.5/7-levels. This indicates that the proposed conversational features of TV-watching Companion Robot have the potential to make our daily lives more enjoyable. Under the analysis of the initial experiments, we achieve further experiments with more participants by dividing them into two groups: a control group without a robot and an intervention group with a robot. The results show that people prefer to talk to robots because the robot will bring more enjoyable, relaxed, and interesting.