Dialogue Robots That Promote Relationship Building Among People Based on Common Preferences and Interests: A Field Trial

Abstract

This study develops dialogue robots that encourage users to talk with the other directly to promote relationship building among them. It is said that friendly relationships with others have a positive impact on mental health and that face-to-face communication is important for building friendly relationships. However, building relationships with others is not easy, and many people find it difficult to find topics of conversation. While previous studies have supported relationship building using robots that share preferences, these studies are limited to users’ subjective evaluations, and it is not clear whether they can get people to talk directly to each other. This study proposes a dialogue robot based on identifying the common preferences with high information content and interests among the user and a third party. It also encourages direct conversation between them by creating a common question about the third party. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we introduced the developed robots into an elementary school sixth-grade classroom for five days. The experimental results suggest that the proposed condition was more likely to increase the frequency of conversation among children in the pre-post period. The results also suggest that the proposed condition could be more likely to increase the frequency of conversation among children in the pre-week and pre-month periods. These results are valuable because they suggest the possibility that robots can support the construction of relationships among children in an actual elementary school setting. Future work can also verify the usefulness of the robots in various communities.