Adaptive linguistic style for an assistive robotic health companion based on explicit human feedback

In the future, an increasing amount of social robots will be found in our domestic environments to support and facilitate everyday life. Especially in the context of assistive, health-related support, more and more robotic products are on the way to the consumer market. While one can observe that many commercial efforts are put into the visual appearance, embodiment, motion and sound of companion robots, this paper focuses on the robot's conversational skills. We investigate how to adapt the robot's linguistic style to the individual user's preferences. This includes two forms of robot persona in the context of information retrieval tasks and games, as well as politeness with regard to recommendations. Therefore, we present an autonomous companion robot, which adapts its spoken language based on explicit human feedback. It provides several functionalities for information retrieval, reminders, communication and entertainment as well as health-related recommendations. Results of the in-situ study with elderly participants indicate that human preferences vary with regard to the robot's employed politeness strategies. Furthermore, the participants preferred assistant persona over companion persona in the information retrieval context.