Effects of a Listener Robot with Children in Storytelling

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of a listener robot that joins a storytelling situation for children as a side-participant. For this purpose, we develop a storytelling-robot system that consists of both reader and listener robots. Our semi-autonomous system involves a human operator who makes correct responses and provides easily understandable answers to the children's questions during storytelling. We develop a gaze model for the natural and autonomous gaze behaviors of a reader robot by considering multiple listeners and a storytelling object (a display that shows images). We conducted an experiment with 16 children to investigate whether they preferred storytelling with/without the listener robot and the changes of speech activities during the storytelling. Children preferred storytelling with the listener robot to storytelling without it. Their speech activities decreased when the listener robot was involved in the storytelling.