A research group led by Associate Professor Fumihide Tanaka of the University of Tsukuba has clarified that if a robot can sense its emotions and intentions when it speaks, the degree of seriousness that a person feels toward the robot will increase significantly.
Products with speech functions such as robots and AI speakers have become widespread.However, the voice of a machine is flatter than the human voice, and it is said that the message does not feel "weight". In situations where important content is conveyed, there is a need for technology that enhances the table output of the message and makes the listener feel the weight. rice field.
Therefore, the research team developed a mechanism that incorporates a weight inside a small robot and can move the weight according to the utterance of the robot, and announced it in 2020.The user holds the robot in his hand and can feel the emotions and intentions of the robot according to the utterance from the movement of the internal weight.
This time, for the first time, we investigated the effect of a robot equipped with this mechanism on the other party.The experiment participants were asked to interact with the robot after imagining a situation in which they were angry by using a dialogue scenario prepared in advance (an acquaintance was late for a meeting) (following an acquaintance who was late for the robot). Contents).
From the results of a questionnaire survey of 94 participants in the experiment, the degree of seriousness felt toward the robot was significantly higher under the condition where the internal weight movement was presented according to the utterance, compared with the condition where only the utterance was presented.Furthermore, under the former condition, an average of 23% of anger suppression effect was confirmed compared with the latter condition.At the same time, it was shown that the feeling of forgiveness for those who were late was increased.
The technology developed and verified this time is expected to be useful for effective communication of elements such as "feelings" and "emotions" in a society where people and AI and robots communicate with each other through such technologies. Will be done.
