Robot: Answer Me Now!

In the near future, we’ll begin issuing commands to our home robots by voice. But this will soon evolve beyond the mere one-way issuance of orders. For robots to be truly useful in our homes. it will be imperative that we be able to carry on actual conversations with them. But, just as you have no patience for slow response times on your computer now, researchers have found that you likewise will have no patience from a slow-to-respond robot. Even if that means filling awkward moments of silence with small talk, as your robot is thinking, humans need to receive near-immediate input. Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, set out to find out just how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners’ requests by asking 38 students to give orders to a robot. The robot was set to respond in from anywhere from zero to 5 seconds. The students’ patience began to run out after 2 seconds, with 1 second being the optimal response time. However, and this is very interesting, the impatient students were okay with a slower response time if the robot filled in the time with “filler” words, such as “well” or “er.” When the this occurred, people did not notice the delay. In other word’s, make the robots more human-like. Uh, yeah, um, like, I agree. The study was presented at Human-Robot Interaction 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.