Introducing a note of levity to human-robot interaction with dialogs containing irony, sarcasm and jocularity *

Dialogs between humans and social robots are often fact-oriented and not very mood-dependent, at least on the part of the robot. This raises the question of what influence the tonality of the utterances has on the perceived personality of the robot and how this influences the user’s further expectations. One element that is not necessarily expected from robots in conversation is humor, especially the use of irony and sarcasm. We examined the effect of a conversation with cheerfully ironic or sullenly sarcastic remarks by the robot in contrast to utterances in a more seriously neutral tone. To measure these effects in terms of perceived warmth, competence and possible discomfort in conversation we used the Robotic Social Attributes Scale (RoSAS) on 20 participants with an age ranging from 26 to 58. In addition, we asked the participants for their assessment of the suitability of the robot’s dialog style for different areas of application and which dialog style they personally liked best. The dialog parts of the robot were generated with ChatGPT using suitable prompts. Our results showed that the perceived warmth gained highest rates when when the robot hat a cheerfully ironic tone. Discomfort was rated significantly higher when a sullenly sarcastic tone was used by the robot. Perceived competence seemed to be slightly negatively influenced in the sarcastic condition. The results proved that tonality appears to be a very relevant design element for a successful interaction between humans and robots, but must be used carefully to achieve the desired goal.