How People Talk with Robots: Designing Dialogue to Reduce User Uncertainty

If human-robot interaction is mainly shaped by users' strategies to deal with their unfamiliar artificial com munication partner, as it is suggested here, robot dialogue design should orient toward reducing users' uncertainty about the affordances of the robot and the joint task. Two experiments are presented that investigate the impact of verbal robot utterances on users' behavior; results show that users react sensitively to subtle linguistic cues that may guide them into appropriate understandings of the robot. Furthermore, the role of user expectations and robot appearance are discussed in the light of the model presented. In this article I argue that the peculiarities of human-robot dialogue are best understood as users' strategies to deal with what they understand the challenges of the situation to consist in (Fischer 2006a). That is, users interact with artificial communication partners on the basis of what they consider to be potentially problematic, what the task comprises, what the robot can understand, and so on, that is, what they consider its affordances to be (Gibson 1977).