30. At the Theater—Possibilities of Androids as Poetry-Reciting Agents

In recent years, research on very humanlike androids has increased, in general investigating the following: (1) the manner in which people treat these very humanlike androids and (2) whether it is possible to replace existing communication media, such as telephones or TV conference systems, with androids as a communication medium. We found that androids have advantages over humans in specific contexts. For example, in a collaborative theatrical project between artists and androids, audiences were impressed by the androids that read poetry. We therefore experimentally compared androids and humans in a poetry-reciting context by conducting an experiment to illustrate the influence of an android who recited poetry. Participants listened to poetry that was read by three poetry-reciting agents: an android, a human model on which the android was based, and a box. The experimental results show that the participants scored their enjoyment of the poetry highest under the android condition, indicating that the android has an advantage for communicating the meaning of poetry.