Effectiveness of Robot Communication Level on Likeability, Understandability and Comfortability

The proliferation of commercially available social robots is undeniable. As humans and robots interact more closely and frequently, it brings to light issues surrounding how the human feels and perceives when dealing with robots how much do they like the way the interaction occurs, how well do they understand what the robot is trying to communicate, and how comfortable do they feel? Much of this is intertwined within the communication level that the robot uses. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of different robot communication levels - voice only, sound only, or voice and sound - when applied to robots designed with differing levels of anthropomorphism and different purposes, evaluating the resulting impact on human-robot interaction with respect to likeability, understandability and comfort. We evaluate these factors on 13 commercially designed robots. Our results show that in almost all cases, survey responders showed a preference for robots that incorporate more spoken interaction than currently deployed systems.