Development of an Embodied Group Entrainmacent Response System to Express Interaction-Activated Communication

Abstract

In situations that demand audience participation, such as lectures and speeches, the sense of unity of the communication place is created by mutual interactions between the performer and audience. Therefore, the speaker’s willingness to talk increases with the increase in the responses of the listeners, thus strengthening the interaction. We have developed a speech-driven embodied entrainment toy robot called Pekoppa that generates communicative motions and actions such as nods for entrained interactions from speech rhythm based only on voice input. In this research, we developed a system that activates the interaction by changing the embodied response by nodding from multiple toy robots based on speech inputs. Moreover, we confirmed the effectiveness of the system by sensory evaluation and behavior analysis through experiments on 24 participants.