On the Reaction to Robot’s Speech in a Hotel Public Space

This article presents a study using social robots in a hotel public space. The objective of this study is to investigate people’s response to robot’s different speech. We used humanoid robot NAO for setting up our experiments: (i) A single robot greeted each guest. (ii) A single robot engaged in soliloquy about hotel’s information. (iii) Dual robots had conversations between each other about hotel’s information. In each experiment, hotel guests’ behavior in response to robot’s speech was studied by using four patterns that reflected the level of a guest’s interest to the robot’s speech. With these behavior-patterns, we analyzed the guests’ first and second responses after they encountered with the robot in the hotel. Our study helps to understand the practical effectiveness of robot’s speech in a public space context, which could inspire the design of hotel-assistive robots.