Helen Hastie

And we would change the interaction periodically so that they would feel like it was more natural and varied, like a human barista.

We measured people's attitude across six weeks and luckily we didn't put them off.

So there's this scale called the negative attitude to robots.

So people, their attitudes basically didn't change.

There is something called a novelty effect in robotics where people first of all get really excited and use robots and then they kind of go off it and they can't be bothered afterwards.

But we didn't see that, which is good.

I was going to say that might have been the fact.

And also trustworthiness and likability and usability are closely linked.

Yes, our empathic robotic tutor was very complicated.

It could understand and sense a student's frustration and it changed the way it taught based on how the student was feeling or how it perceived the student was doing.

We found that the empathic robot created more motivated learners.

This is mostly the visual indicators of frustration and also the volume of their speech as well.

Yes, my kids did tend to be guinea pigs, willing guinea pigs, I would like to say.

So they would pilot the systems quite frequently.

They didn't mind, but for this particular application, it did mean that they had to learn quite a bit more geography, which they weren't really keen on.

This was an experiment run during COVID.

So we weren't actually in situ running the experiment.

But we were looking at a robot that would be, for example, at the reception of a hospital and then would ask about symptoms and then tell people whether to go home or to take a seat.

And we found that transparency is really important.

So the robot had to explain the reasoning behind its decision.