An Attentive Listening System for Autonomous Android ERICA: Comparative Evaluation with Human Attentive Listeners

Abstract

An attentive listening system for autonomous android ERICA is presented. Our goal is to realize a humanlike natural attentive listener for elderly people. The proposed system generates listener responses: backchannels, repeats, elaborating questions, assessments, and generic responses. The system incorporates speech processing using a microphone array and real-time dialogue processing including continuous backchannel prediction and turn-taking prediction. In this study, we conducted a dialogue experiment with elderly people. The system was compared with a WOZ system where a human operator played the listener role behind the robot. As a result, the system showed comparable scores in basic skills of attentive listening, such as easy to talk, seriously listening, focused on the talk, and actively listening. It was also found that there is still a gap between the system and the human (WOZ) for high-level attentive listening skills such as dialogue understanding, showing interest, and empathy towards the user.