We explore the effect of laughter perception and response in terms of engagement in human-robot interaction. We designed two distinct experiments in which the robot has two modes: laughter responsive and laughter non-responsive. In responsive mode, the robot detects laughter using a multimodal real-time laughter detection module and invokes laughter as a backchannel to users accordingly. In non-responsive mode, robot has no utilization of detection, thus provides no feedback. In the experimental design, we use a straightforward question-answer based interaction scenario using a back-projected robot head. We evaluate the interactions with objective and subjective measurements of engagement and user experience.
Cite as: Türker, B.B., Buçinca, Z., Erzin, E., Yemez, Y., Sezgin, M. (2017) Analysis of Engagement and User Experience with a Laughter Responsive Social Robot. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 844-848, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1395
@inproceedings{turker17_interspeech,
author={Bekir Berker Türker and Zana Buçinca and Engin Erzin and Yücel Yemez and Metin Sezgin},
title={{Analysis of Engagement and User Experience with a Laughter Responsive Social Robot}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={844--848},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1395}
}