We have got thoroughly used to phone trees and trawling through automated responses when we phone companies. In the old days dialing “O” usually
cut through the trail, but that often doesn’t cut it today. The next routine
sorting job that looks set for our robot friends is the “Receptionist.” I can
already hear the cries of horror and derision, but robots are already being
optimized for the job. (Optimized sounds so much nicer than being trained,
don’t you think?)
Information about the establishment, recording your
details, and contacting the person that you’re visiting are all straightforward
tasks that the computer in any self-respecting robot could handle without difficulty.
But a good receptionist does more than that – they make the visitor feel at
ease and appear to be interested in them, that is, listening to them and paying
attention to what they say.
Here is the challenge, then. How does a robot show
that they are paying attention to someone and are therefore interested in what
they have to say? Holthaus et al from
Bielefeld U have set out to solve that problem.
They chose a rather plain lady-like robot for their
experiments with 111 people coming up to her desk. Her responsiveness was
programmed on the basis of proximity. “She” would pay more attention to those
who were close compared to those who were a long distance away. That all makes sense to me. We all like to stand in line so the guy at the back of the line gets
attended to last.
People said that they felt better about her
attention to them when she wasn’t giving them her full attention. If she turned
at random, not just her head, but her upper body, and came back to them, they
felt that she was more aware of their presence and was in charge of what was
going on.
This seems to be counterintuitive, but then nobody
ever listens to me with consistent rapt attention. They fidget, look around and
some will have successfully spotted somewhere to scuttle off to, so, I guess, a
robot doing the same thing would make me think it was just like a real person.
- P. Holthaus, K. Pitsch and S. Wachsmuth, Int. J. Soc. Robotics, (2011), DOI 10.1007/s12369-011-0108-9
