Conversational Fillers for Response Delay Amelioration in Child-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Conversation Fillers (CFs) such as ”um”, ”hmm”, and ”ah” were tested alongside iconic pensive or acknowledging gestures for their ef- fectiveness at mitigating the negative effects associated with unwanted anthropomorphic robot response delay. Employing CFs in interac- tions with nine- and ten-year-old children was found to be effective at improving perceived speediness, aliveness, humanness, and likability without decreasing perceptions of intelligence, trustworthiness, or au- tonomy. The results also show that an experimenter covertly crafting a robot’s vocalized response has a slower heart rate and a higher heart rate variability, an indication of a lower stress level, when the robot is filling the associated delay with CFs than when not.