Irony Man: Augmenting a Social Robot with the Ability to Use Irony in Multimodal Communication with Humans

Interpersonal communication is often full of irony and irony related humor, which can shape the quality of a conversation and how conversation partners perceive each other. If social robots were able to integrate irony in their communication style, their human conversation partners might perceive them as more natural, credible, and ultimately more attractive and acceptable. In order to explore this assumption, we first describe an approach to transform non-ironic inputs on-the-fly into multimodal ironic utterances. Irony markers are used to adapt language, prosody and facial expression. We argue that doing this allows to dynamically enrich a robot's spoken language with an expression of socially intelligent behavior. We then demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by reporting on a user study, which compares an ironic version of a robot with a non-ironic version of the same robot in a small talk dialog scenario. Results show that participants are indeed able to correctly identify a robot's use of irony and that a better user experience is associated with an ironic robot version. This is an important step for dynamically shaping a robot's personality and humor, and to increase perceived social intelligence.