How quickly should a communication robot respond? delaying strategies and habituation effects

Time Figure 1: Robot performs conversational fillers to buy time That one! Oh, this one. OK, I’ll bring it later.etto... This paper reports a study about system response time (SRT) in communication robots that utilize human-like social features, such as anthropomorphic appearance and conversation in natural language. Our research purpose established a design guideline for SRT in communication robots. The first experiment observed user preferences toward different SRTs in interaction with a robot. In other existing user interfaces, faster response is usually preferred. In contrast, our experimental result indicated that user preference for SRT in a communication robot is highest at one second, and user preference ratings level off at two seconds. However, a robot cannot always respond in such a short time as one or two seconds. Thus, the important question is “What should a robot do if it cannot respond quickly enough? ” The second experiment tested the effectiveness of a conversational filler: behavior to notify listeners that the robot is going to respond. In Japanese “etto ” is used to buy time to think and resembles “well... ” and “uh... ” In English. We used the same strategy in a communication robot to shadow system response time. Our results indicated that using a conversational filler by the robot moderated the user's impression toward a long SRT