Interaction Design and Field Study of a Forgetful Social Robot, "Talking-Bones"

This paper presents an overview of Talking-Bones where the robot aims to communicate with humans in a conversation recalling together. Talking-Bones exhibits encouraging behaviors by forgetting some words in a story and asking humans to help to recall the words together in order to continue telling the story. In our field work, we observed that people found the forgotten words together and enjoyed teaching the robot often laughing and smiling. From this exercise in Joint-Remembering, we suggest that Talking-Bones has the ability to bring out helping behaviours and facilitate communication. In this paper we describe the concept of Talking-Bones and details of the robot design. Also, we describe part of the observed interaction.