Spoken Dialogue Strategy Focusing on Asymmetric Communication with Android Robots

Humans are easily conscious of small differences in an android robot's (AR's) behaviors and utterances, resulting in treating the AR as not-human, while ARs treat us as humans. Thus, there exists asymmetric communication between ARs and humans. In our system at Dialogue Robot Competition 2022, this asymmetry was a considerable research target in our dialogue strategy. For example, tricky phrases such as questions related to personal matters and forceful requests for agreement were experimentally used in AR's utterances. We assumed that these AR phrases would have a reasonable chance of success, although humans would likely hesitate to use the phrases. Additionally, during a five-minute dialogue, our AR's character, such as its voice tones and sentence expressions, changed from mechanical to human-like type in order to pretend to tailor to customers. The characteristics of the AR developed by our team, DSML-TDU, are introduced in this paper.