Chatbot and dialogue demonstration with a humanoid robot in the lecture class

Abstract

This paper describes ideas to extend the way of verbal lecture visually and verbally. Firstly, we conducted questionnaires to the first-year university students of the science education. As for the attention to the verbal and visual information, we noticed participants’ worry about keeping following with the verbal lecturing. We also noticed the participants’ preference for the visual presentation. These imply a potential necessity of visual presentation that supplements the lecturer’s speech in a real time. On the other hand, the results showed a preference for the learning under familiar atmosphere. For the visualization of lecture talk, we created a chatbot on the platform of Api.ai to exhibit a brief explanation or a question of the words as the lecturer utters them. This text visualization provides the basis of the lecture in sync of lecturer’s talk. We also used a humanoid robot for verbal presentation as a partner of the lecturer. The Topic Maps was introduced to build the dialogues for analogy and association. The analogy topic map was constructed based on a Japanese entertainment riddle. Robot dialogues were conducted by connecting an online learning system based on Topic Maps.