Abstract
As agents, social robots are expected to increase opportunities for dialogue with the elderly. However, it is difficult to sustain a dialogue with an elderly user because speech recognition frequently fails during the dialogue. Here, to overcome this problem, regardless of speech recognition failure, we developed a question–answer–response dialogue model. In this model, a robot took initiative in the dialogue by asking the user various questions. Moreover, to improve user experience during dialogue, we extended the model such that two robots could participate in the dialogue. Implementing these features, we conducted a field trial in a nursing home to evaluate the twin-robot dialogue system. The average word error rate of speech recognition was 0.778. Despite the frequently high number of errors, participants talked for 14 min in a dialogue with two robots and felt slightly strange during the dialogue. Although we found no significant difference between a dialogue with one robot and that with two robots, the effect size of the difference in the dialogue time with one robot and that with two robots was medium (Cohen’s d = −0.519). The results suggested that the presence of two robots might likely encourage elderly people to sustain the talk. Our results will contribute to the design of social robots to engage in dialogues with the elderly.
Highlights
For elderly people, it is important to have opportunities to talk with someone daily
Our goal is to develop a robot dialogue system that can sustain a coherent dialogue with elderly people for some time and provide good user experience with the dialogues
We developed a question–answer–response dialogue model in which a robot takes the initiative in a dialogue by asking a user various questions in order to sustain the dialogue regardless of speech recognition failures
Summary
It is important to have opportunities to talk with someone daily. The act of talking with someone is a fundamental action for building social connectedness and reducing the feeling of social isolation. Social disconnectedness and perceived social isolation are likely to cause health risks [1–3], such as dementia [4,5], depression [6], and early death [7]. It is important to increase opportunities for elderly people to have dialogues with other people. Increasing such opportunities are not as easy as they may seem. We considered a case in Japan, which is one of the countries with the highest rate of people aged 65 or over. Ninety percent of the elderly people who live with their families have dialogues every day in
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