Giving Social Robots a Conversational Memory for Motivational Experience Sharing

In ongoing and consecutive conversations with persons, a social robot has to determine which aspects to remember and how to address them in the conversation. In the health domain, important aspects concern the health-related goals, the experienced progress (expressed sentiment) and the ongoing motivation to pursue them. Despite the progress in speech technology and conversational agents, most social robots lack a memory for such experience sharing. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a conversational memory for personalized behavior change support conversations on healthy nutrition via memory-based motivational rephrasing. The main hypothesis is that referring to previous sessions improves motivation and goal attainment, particularly when references vary. In addition, the paper explores how far motivational rephrasing affects user’s perception of the conversational agent (the virtual Furhat). An experiment with 79 participants was conducted via Zoom, consisting of three conversation sessions. The results showed a significant increase in participants’ change in motivation when multiple references to previous sessions were provided.