What should we know to develop an information robot?

Abstract

This paper is aimed at identifying the required knowledge for information robots. We addressed two aspects of this knowledge, 'what should it know' and 'what should it do.' The first part of this study was devoted to the former aspect.We investigated what information staff know and what people expect from information robots.We found that there are a lot of similarities. Based on this, we developed a knowledge structure about an environment to be used to provide information. The developed knowledge structure worked well. In the field study we confirmed that the robot was able to answer most of the requests (96.6%). However, regarding the latter aspect, although we initially replicated what human staff members do, the robot did not serve well.Many users hesitated to speak, and remained quiet. Here, we found that the knowledge for facilitating interaction was missing. We further designed the interaction flow to accommodate people who tend to be quiet. Finally, our field study revealed that the improved interaction flow increased the success ratio of information providing from54.4% to 84.5%.