TV-watching Companion Robot Supported by Open-domain Chatbot “KACTUS”

Watching TV once encouraged generations of families and friends [11] to communicate and share empathy. However, the Internet is changing how we watch TV and reducing interaction, leading to problems such as lack of self-control and inadequate communication skills [17]. To understand the conversations while watching TV, we design a scheme based on human conversational behavior [2], and then develop a prototype of TV-watching companion robot supported by the chatbot “KACTUS” [20]. The robot generates a disclosure utterance (e.g., ”I like elephants”) with extracted keywords from the TV program in “TV-watching mode” and uses a cross-topic dialogue management method from “KACTUS” with question utterance to respond with rich conversations in ”Conversation mode”. The robot switches between these two modes at a preset ratio (TV-watching:3, Conversation:1) and behaves like a human enjoying TV-watching. The result of initial experiment shows that three groups of participants enjoyed talking with the robot and the question about their interests in the robot were rated 6.5 (7-levels: ascending from ”extremely disagree” to ”extremely agree”).