Enhancing Teleoperated Robot Customer Service through Speech Monitoring and Filtering

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a system that supports operators who provide services to customers using teleoperated robots. We observed that unprofessional or lazy operators of teleoperated robots are a risk for businesses as they are likely to speak in ways that are inappropriate for customer services. The proposed system lets competent operators talk freely to customers and thus provide high quality service. For subpar operators, the proposed system filters inappropriate utterances to improve the service they provide. We conducted a user study with 21 participants to compare the proposed support system to a baseline system where operators talk freely to customers. For subpar operators, the quality of the service is significantly higher in terms of perceived politeness and reported customer satisfaction when using the proposed support system compared to when using the baseline system. For competent operators, we found no significant differences in the quality of the service between the two systems.