How to Improve Human-Robot Interaction with Conversational Fillers

Abstract

Conversation Fillers (CFs), such as ‘um’, ‘hmm’, and ‘ah’, may help to improve the human-robot interaction by smoothening the robot’s responses. This paper presents the design and test of such CFs – alongside iconic pensive or acknowledging gestures – for Wizard of Oz (WoZ) controlled open-ended dialogues in child-robot interactions. A controlled experiment with 26 children showed that these CFs can improve the perceived speediness, aliveness, humanness, and likability of the robot, without decreasing perceptions of intelligence,
trustworthiness, or autonomy.