Robot public speakers’ effect on audience affective reaction and attention allocation

Social robots delivering public speeches have a wide range of practical applications as stand-ins for educators, experts, or entertainers. The goal of our work is to investigate how a social robot should be programmed to deliver an effective public speech. Applying a mixed methods research design to collect quantitative and qualitative data, we have conducted a study, which compares a human speaker with a semi-anthropomorphic social robot speaker (the SoftBank Pepper robot). The robot was programmed to mimic the behaviour patterns of the human delivering the same speech. The study results show that the robot is perceived as intelligent and rational, which contributes to effective delivery of the message content. However, the robot struggles with actively engaging the audience and with establishing an emotional connection. In addition, the behavioural patterns that appear natural in the human speaker tend to be distracting in the robot. Suggestions for the improved design of robot public speakers are discussed, which include implementing rhetoric skills, exploiting and synchronising the robot’s specific communication channels, and creating a robot persona.