News: People prefer robots that do small talk

* NewScientist.com
* 20 March 2008

ROBOTS of the future may have to learn to make small talk if humans are to accept them.

To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners' requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as "take out the trash" to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond.

The students liked delays of no more than 1 second best, with 2 seconds being their limit. However, when the robot took longer, impatient students were assuaged if it filled the time with words such as "well" or "er". "When the robot used conversational fillers to buy time until it could respond, people didn't notice the delay," Shiwa says. He presented the study last week at Human-Robot Interaction 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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