Attitude towards Dialogue Robot as Interactional Practice

Abstract

The questions "How human-like is this dialogue robot?" and "How natural was the conversation with this dialogue robot?" are major concerns for dialogue robot researchers and developers. However, they have overlooked the way that unique conversational structures exist in actual conversations between humans and dialogue robots, which are different from those between humans. In this paper, we focus on the repetition of the user's own speech, and the user's commenting in the absence of a robot's response, in a conversation with a dialogue robot. These phenomena are unique to conversations with dialogue robots. When the user's speech is not inputted into dialogue robots, users often repeat their own speech. In addition, when the repeated speech is also not inputted to the dialogue robot, users often comment on the absence of response from the robot by giving reasons why the robot does not respond. These phenomena are organized in order, which means the repetition is performed firstly, and if the repeated speech is not inputted, then secondly, users will comment on the absence of response from the robot. We analyze these situations using conversation analysis methods, and discuss how these phenomena are organized in order, and how these phenomena are unique to conversations with dialogue robots. In the last part of the paper, we reconsider the "human-likeness" of dialogue robots.