“Pepper, what do you mean?” Miscommunication and repair in robot-led survey interaction

Abstract

This article analyzes various kinds of interactional trouble occurring in task-oriented human-robot interaction. We focus on users' repair strategies, typically used for maintaining communication in social interaction. We use an existing dataset consisting of 36 video-recordings of elderly people completing a lengthy health survey with a Pepper robot. Miscommunication was abundant in the data, with some types of repair being more common than others. These were mainly related to "hearing trouble" on the side of the robot, leading to participants’ repeats and rephrasings. Interactional trouble was also found to escalate, with multiple repair initiations, sometimes leading to "second best answers". This appeared to be a strategy for participants to avoid repair in the service of progressivity. Overall, miscommunication and repair in these task-oriented human-robot interactions require substantial adaptation from the human.