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Seeing eye to eye: trustworthy embodiment for task-based conversational agents
,
Peter E. McKenna,
Xingkun Liu,
Katrin Lohan,
Helen Hastie
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Volume: 10
Swansea University Author:
Muneeb Ahmad
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© 2023 Robb, Lopes, Ahmad, McKenna, Liu, Lohan and Hastie. Distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0).
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DOI (Published version): 10.3389/frobt.2023.1234767
Abstract
Smart speakers and conversational agents have been accepted into our homes for a number of tasks such as playing music, interfacing with the internet of things, and more recently, general chit-chat. However, they have been less readily accepted in our workplaces. This may be due to data privacy and...
| Published in: | Frontiers in Robotics and AI |
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| ISSN: | 2296-9144 |
| Published: |
Frontiers Media SA
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| Online Access: |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa64061 |
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| Abstract: |
Smart speakers and conversational agents have been accepted into our homes for a number of tasks such as playing music, interfacing with the internet of things, and more recently, general chit-chat. However, they have been less readily accepted in our workplaces. This may be due to data privacy and security concerns that exist with commercially available smart speakers. However, one of the reasons for this may be that a smart speaker is simply too abstract and does not portray the social cues associated with a trustworthy work colleague. Here, we present an in-depth mixed method study, in which we investigate this question of embodiment in a serious task-based work scenario of a first responder team. We explore the concepts of trust, engagement, cognitive load, and human performance using a humanoid head style robot, a commercially available smart speaker, and a specially developed dialogue manager. Studying the effect of embodiment on trust, being a highly subjective and multi-faceted phenomena, is clearly challenging, and our results indicate that potentially, the robot, with its anthropomorphic facial features, expressions, and eye gaze, was trusted more than the smart speaker. In addition, we found that embodying a conversational agent helped increase task engagement and performance compared to the smart speaker. This study indicates that embodiment could potentially be useful for transitioning conversational agents into the workplace, and further in situ, “in the wild” experiments with domain workers could be conducted to confirm this. |
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| Keywords: |
Conversational agent, remote robots, autonomous systems, human–robot teaming, social robotics, user engagement, cognitive load |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
| Funders: |
Funders of this work are the UKRI EPSRC ORCA Hub (EP/R026173/1) and the UKRI EPSRC Trustworthy
732 Autonomous Systems (TAS) Node on Trust (EP/V026682/1). |