Influences of a robot's presence and speeches in a cooking support system

Abstract

Home cooking sometimes lacks pleasure and motivation because most people cook by themselves. Our approach to solve this problem is to introduce a conversational robot. We explored the influences of the conversational robot in the cooking support system. It revealed that the robot's presence increases pleasure and maintain motivation. Then we evolved this system more sophisticated. The voice of the robot was changed into recorded voice of man from the synthesized speech. Speech of the robot was improved to vary depending on the situation properly between courtesy and brevity. As a result of them, it was found that fine-grained control of the speech of the robot had a significant effect. It was also revealed that the effect acquired by adding a dialog robot to a cooking supporting system serves as the maximum to cooking beginners.