From Tool to Teammate: Balancing Task-Oriented and Social Talk During Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

As robots become more integrated into shared work environments, effective communication must balance clear task directives with social engagement to support both efficiency and user satisfaction. This letter examines how people perceive task-oriented versus social dialogue during human–robot collaboration and how they judge the appropriateness of switching between them. We discuss a pilot, in-person data collection and two follow-up online studies with an autonomous robot in a collaborative pizza-making task. The pilot assesses the technical feasibility of an autonomous robot generating distinct task and social dialogue styles. Next, with a larger participant sample, we evaluate the salience of the two talk types and their impact on perceptions of the robot as a collaborative partner. The second study explores judgments of talk type switching using video clips from the pilot, revealing how timing, task state, and user behavior influence perceived appropriateness. Together, these findings highlight nuanced human expectations for robot communication and inform the design of collaborative robots that can adaptively balance task-oriented and social talk in contextually sensitive ways.