Impressions made by blinking light used to create artificial subtle expressions and by robot appearance in human-robot speech interaction

The impressions made by a blinking light used to create artificial subtle expressions (ASEs) and by a robot's appearance on users were investigated. The blinking light, which shows the user that the robot is performing speech recognition and thereby prevents utterance collisions, was separated from the robot by embedding it in a pedestal unit. In an evaluation experiment, participants performed five tasks with a spoken dialogue system coupled to a robot placed on the pedestal. The participants' impressions of the dialogue interactions and of the robot were obtained under four conditions (w/ light blinking or w/o blinking; humanoid or cuboid robot). The cuboid robot created a stronger impression of comfort and excitement for the interactions while the blinking light did not create a strong impression of anything. The robot's appearance and the blinking did not create a strong impression of anything for the robot. This suggests that the blinking light in the pedestal unit is a factor that is independent of robot appearance, meaning that the pedestal unit can be applied to robots with various appearances.