Get off on the right foot with whom?: How users’ profiles affect their perception and experience with a social robot

The paper was accepted and presented as a poster at the SOLAR workshop (Socially-acceptable robots: concepts, techniques, and applications) at the IEEE ICRA 2023 conference.

In human-robot interaction, the concept of user-centred interaction is widely appreciated. With the popularity of speech-enabled social robots, what does user-centred interaction mean for their form and function? This article aims to answer this question based on a user study. Apart from standard demographic information, it also considers users’ knowledge, experience and attitudes towards the speaking agents. It tests the degree to which different types of users have different preferences, interaction experiences and satisfaction with the speaking robots. This study is anticipated to develop design principles for social robots’ affordances by refining the frame-work for user profiling in human-robot spoken interaction.