How Quickly Should Communication Robots Respond?
Open accessAbstract
This paper reports a study about system response time (SRT) in communication robots that utilize human-like social features, such as anthropomorphic appearance and conversation in natural language. Our research purpose established a design guideline for SRT in communication robots. The first experiment observed user preferences toward different SRTs in interaction with a robot. In other existing user interfaces, faster response is usually preferred. In contrast, our experimental result indicated that user preference for SRT in a communication robot is highest at one second, and user preference ratings level off at two seconds. However, a robot cannot always respond in such a short time as one or two seconds. Thus, the important question is “What should a robot do if it cannot respond quickly enough?” The second experiment tested the effectiveness of a conversational filler: behavior to notify listeners that the robot is going to respond. We used the same strategy in a communication robot to shadow system response time. Our results indicated that using a conversational filler by the robot moderated the user's impression toward a long SRT. Put it all together, we obtained a) users'; impressions toward the robot are unchanged until one second SRT, b) the robot should react within two seconds SRT, and c) use of conversational fillers are effective to let the users to wait from these two experiments.
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The two second rule can be applied to the field of Human-Robot Interaction.
“In 2009, Shiwa et al. demonstrated that this rule can be applied to the field of Human–Robot Interaction [37].”
From Modelling Multimodal Dialogues for Social Robots Using Communicative Acts (2020) · cites this paper as [37]
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Shiwa, T., Kanda, T., Imai, M., Ishiguro, H., Hagita, N., & Anzai, Y.
- Affiliations
- Keio University (JP)
- Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (JP)
- Venue
- Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan
- Publisher
- The Robotics Society of Japan
- Published
- 2009
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 87-95
- ISSN
- 0289-1824 (ISSN-L)
- 1884-7145
- OpenAlex
- W2325324799
- Cited by
- 13
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 3 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 0.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- ja
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan (publishedVersion)
- 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
- communication robots, system response time, human-robot interaction, user preferences, design guidelines, natural language conversation
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