Improving user's sense of participation in robot-driven dialogue

In this study, we aimed to enhance the sense of dialogue participation (SDP), which reflects an individual's conscious engagement in dialogues, and investigated the multimodal dialogue elements that contribute to its improvement. To achieve this, we developed a dialogue system utilizing an android robot specifically for tour spot recommendations at a travel agency. The system was designed with various components aimed at enhancing SDP and was evaluated by 29 participants during the Dialogue Robot Competition 2022. After conceptually defining SDP, we employed the author's subjective evaluation to visualize the time-series changes in SDP at approximately 20-second intervals, using video recordings of the dialogues. Initially, we expected an overall decrease in SDP, as the robot had a speaking duration of around two minutes during the middle of the dialogue session when presenting the tour plan. However, the analysis of five participants' data revealed an increase in SDP during segments that involved 'Dealing with content that increases the user's interest' and 'Multimodal response requests.' Consequently, we can conclude that these elements have a discernible impact on enhancing SDP.