Social robots as conversational catalysts: Enhancing long-term human-human interaction at home

The integration of social robots into family environments raises critical questions about their long-term influence on family interactions. This study explores the potential of social robots as conversational catalysts in human-human dyadic interaction, focusing on enhancing high-quality, reciprocal conversations between parents and children during dialogic coreading activities. With the increasing prevalence of social robots in homes and the recognized importance of parent-child exchanges for children’s developmental milestones, this work presents a comprehensive empirical investigation involving more than 70 parent-child dyads over a period of 1 to 2 months. We examined the effects of three robot interaction styles—a passive robot listener, an active robot with a fixed behavior strategy, and an active robot with a strategy-switching mechanism—on parent-child conversational dynamics. Our findings reveal that a robot’s active participation enhances the quality of parent-child dialogic conversations. The influence of robot facilitation varied on the basis of parental English proficiency. Strategy-switching robots provided greater benefits to non–native English–speaking families, whereas dyads with native English–speaking parents benefited more from fixed-strategy robots. Overall, this study highlights the promise of social robots that empower parents in fostering their children’s dialogic development—a contrast with the prevalent design of educational robots that primarily target children. It provides critical insights into the equitable, nuanced design of long-term family-robot interactions at home, especially in supporting diverse family backgrounds.