ROBOTS of the future may have to learn to make small talk if humans are to accept them.
To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners鈥� requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as 鈥渢ake out the trash鈥� to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond.
The students liked delays of no more than 1 second best, with 2 seconds being their limit. However, when the robot took longer, impatient students were assuaged if it filled the time with words such as 鈥渨ell鈥� or 鈥渆r鈥�. 鈥淲hen the robot used conversational fillers to buy time until it could respond, people didn鈥檛 notice the delay,鈥� Shiwa says. He presented the study last week at Human-Robot Interaction 2008 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
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