Believable Robot Characters
Open accessAbstract
Believability of characters has been an objective in literature, theater, film, and animation. We argue that believable robot characters are important in human‐robot interaction, as well. In particular, we contend that believable characters evoke users' social responses that, for some tasks, lead to more natural interactions and are associated with improved task performance. In a dialogue‐capable robot, a key to such believability is the integration of a consistent story line, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and sociocultural context. We describe our work in this area and present empirical results from three robot receptionist test beds that operate “in the wild.”
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Greetings and farewells are considered adequate means to encourage social responses by users.
“Greetings and farewells are considered adequate means to encourage social responses by users (e.g., Simmons et al. 2011)”
From AI-based chatbots in customer service and their effects on user compliance (2021) · cites this paper as Simmons et al. 2011
In “Eliciting Social Behaviors through Dialogue Strategies,” the paper reports that a robot greeting increased the likelihood of a user greeting, and that priming users with “Thanks for stopping by” increased thanking and farewells. It treats farewells as a user response, not as a means the robot uses to encourage social responses; it also does not establish that greetings alone are adequate for that purpose. Page numbers are not available in the supplied passages. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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Sorted by citations
AI-based chatbots in customer service and their effects on user compliance
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“…has shown that people relate to non-human agents in social ways, including extending moral judgments to them [32], attributing them sociocultural awareness [63], and trusting them based on their behavior and anthropomorphism [51] as well as, most relevantly for our work, their use of language [72].”
Language-Capable Robots may Inadvertently Weaken Human Moral Norms
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- Authors
- Simmons, R., Makatchev, M., Kirby, R., Lee, M. K., Fanaswala, I., Browning, B., Forlizzi, J., & Sakr, M.
- Affiliations
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University Qatar (QA)
- Venue
- AI Magazine
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2011-12
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 39-52
- ISSN
- 0738-4602 (ISSN-L)
- 2371-9621
- OpenAlex
- W2137789046
- Cited by
- 54
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 2.60
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- AI Magazine (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Qatar National Research Fund
- National Science Foundation (IIS‐0624275, CNS‐0709077)
- Kwanjeong Educational Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Keywords
- believable characters, robot characters, human-robot interaction, nonverbal behavior, sociocultural context, task performance
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