eMuu - An InterFace for the HomeLab

Abstract

A salient feature of the ambient intelligent home of the future will be the natural interaction between the home and its inhabitants through speech. An embodied home character is necessary to ensure a natural dialogue by continuously providing intuitive feedback in the form of conversational and emotional body language. This study experimentally investigates the influence of the character’s embodiment (screen character and robotic character) and its emotional expressiveness on the enjoyability of the interaction. The presence of emotional expressions significantly increased the enjoyability of the interaction with the robotic character. The embodiment had no significant influence on the enjoyability. However, in the robotic character condition a social facilitation effect and a high forgiveness for speech recognition errors was observed.