Artificial Subtle Expressions: Intuitive Notification Methodology of Artifacts

Takanori KOMATSU (Shinshu Univ.), Seiji YAMADA (NII)
Kazuki KOBAYASHI (Shinshu Univ.), Kotaro FUNAKOSHI (Honda Research Institute Japan), Mikio NAKANO (Honda Research Institute Japan)

We proposed artificial subtle expressions (ASEs) as intuitive notification methodology for artifacts’ internal states for users. We prepared two types of audio ASEs; one was a flat artificial sound (flat ASE), and the other was a sound that decreased in pitch (decreasing ASE). These two ASEs were played after a robot made a suggestion to the users. Specifically, we expected that the decreasing ASE would inform users of the robot’s lower level of confidence about the suggestions. We then conducted a simple experiment to observe whether the participants accepted or rejected the robot’s suggestion in terms of the ASEs. The results showed that they accepted the robot’s suggestion when the flat ASE was used, whereas they rejected it when the decreasing ASE was used. Therefore, we found that the ASEs succeeded in conveying the robot’s internal state to the users accurately and intuitively.

• No.2 (Ni Ban in Japanese) + Decreasing beep ASE
  

• Flat beep ASE
  

• Decreasing beep ASE2
  

Publications

• T. Komatsu, S. Yamada, K. Kobayashi, K. Funakoshi and M. Nakano: Proposing Artificial Subtle Expressions as an Intuitive Notification Methodology for Artificial Agents’ Internal States, In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI-2010), pp.447-452, Portland, USA (Aug. 2010)
• T. Komatsu, S. Yamada, K. Kobayashi, K. Funakoshi and M. Nakano: Artificial Subtle Expressions: Intuitive Notification Methodology of Artifacts, In Proceedings of the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI-2010), pp.1941-1944, Atlanta, USA (Apr. 2010)