Chat robot coupling machine responses and social media comments for continuous conversation

In this paper we propose a communicative robot that facilitates talk with a user who lacks a chance of verbal communication with others for any reasons (e.g. the elderly who live alone). As our first trial, this system is designed to support a user to talk while watching a TV program. It features two conversation techniques: realizing natural timing of simultaneous response and providing interesting utterances from social media networks related to the TV program the user is watching. To achieve natural response timing, the proposed system includes three response functions: backchannel, repetition and machine answering. While the system keeps talking using the three kinds of responses, it searches human text comments about the TV program from social network services (SNS). When a comment is found, the robot outputs the comment by synthetic speech. A preliminary experiment is conducted to evaluate how the proposed response technique encourages a user to speak to the chat robot. The results show that average number of user utterances with the proposed robot using social media networks and the above three functions is significantly higher than that when the chat robot only outputs social media comments.