Conversational Fluency and Attitudes Towards Robot Pilots in Telepresence Robot-Mediated Interactions

In a controlled lab experiment, we compared how in-person and robot-mediated communicative settings affected attitudes towards communicators and discourse phenomena related to conversational negotiation. We used a mock interview within-participants experiment design where each participant (mock interviewee) experienced both types of communication with the same experimenter (mock interviewer). Despite communicating with the same person, participants found the in-person interviewer to be more likable, more capable, more intelligent, more polite, more in control, and less awkward than the same person using a telepresence robot. Behaviorally, we did not detect differences in participants’ productions of discourse phenomena ( like s, you know s, um s, uh s), laughter, or gaze. We also tested the role of communicative expectations on attitudes towards communications. We primed participants to expect that they would be talking to a person via telepresence, a “disabled” robot-person combination using telepresence, or a person in person (between-participants). We did not find differences arising from people’s expectations of the communication.