Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing formal education, fueled by innovations in learning assessment, content generation, and instructional delivery. Informal, lifelong learning settings have been the subject of less attention. We provide a proof-of-concept for an embodied book discussion companion, designed to stimulate conversations with readers about particularly creative metaphors in fiction literature. We collect ratings from 26 participants, each of whom discuss Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" with the robot across one or more sessions, and find that participants rate their interactions highly. This suggests that companion robots could be an interesting entryway for the promotion of lifelong learning and cognitive exercise in future applications.
Although virtual avatars could implement the same methods as robots in most of these cases, they may fall short of achieving the same goals. Research has demonstrated that physically embodied robots elicit longer conversations and more positive perceptions than computer agents @cite_12 , and are better able to influence people than virtual avatars or videos of the same robots @cite_16 . In accordance with these findings, we implement our system using a physically embodied robot to maximize its anticipated utility.
@cite_16 @cite_12
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The effects of physical embodiment and physical presence were explored through a survey of 33 experimental works comparing how people interacted with physical robots and virtual agents. A qualitative assessment of the direction of quantitative effects demonstrated that robots were more persuasive and perceived more positively when physically present in a user?s environment than when digitally-displayed on a screen either as a video feed of the same robot or as a virtual character analog; robots also led to better user performance when they were collocated as opposed to shown via video on a screen. However, participants did not respond differently to physical robots and virtual agents when both were displayed digitally on a screen - suggesting that physical presence, rather than physical embodiment, characterizes people?s responses to social robots. Implications for understanding psychological response to physical and virtual agents and for methodological design are discussed. Survey identified 33 works exploring user responses to physical robots and virtual agents.Robot agents had greater influence when physically present than telepresent.No differences were found between physical robots displayed on a screen and virtual agents that looked similar.Physical presence, but not physical embodiment alone, resulted in more favorable responses from participants. HRI researchers interested in social robots have made large investments in humanoid robots. There is still sparse evidence that peoples' responses to robots differ from their responses to computer agents, suggesting that agent studies might serve to test HRI hypotheses. To help us understand the difference between people's social interactions with an agent and a robot, we experimentally compared people's responses in a health interview with (a) a computer agent projected either on a computer monitor or life-size on a screen, (b) a remote robot projected life-size on a screen, or (c) a collocated robot in the same room. We found a few behavioral and large attitude differences across these conditions. Participants forgot more and disclosed least with the collocated robot, next with the projected remote robot, and then with the agent. They spent more time with the collocated robot and their attitudes were most positive toward that robot. We discuss tradeoffs for HRI research of using collocated robots, remote robots, and computer agents as proxies of robots.