Chapter 4. Talk To Me: Using Speech for Loss-of-Trust Mitigation in Social Robots
Authors: Amandus Krantz, Christian Balkenius and Birger Johansson
Abstract: Robots and autonomous systems are being developed at an ever-increasing rate. Autonomous systems are already prolific in many households around the world, and their adoption is only expected to increase over the coming decades. Even so, many of the systems that are deployed today are still prone to small operational errors such as struggling to navigate complex environments. While the argument over how acceptable these kinds of errors are is still ongoing, these systems are in fact being deployed throughout society and small errors have the potential to gradually erode the trust in them. One way of reducing this erosion of trust in robots is to have the robot provide a spoken explanation for why the error happened. However, speech is not always a given in robots and it is currently unknown how just possessing the ability to speak impacts the impression of a robot. To shed some light on this question, we present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments.