Toward Mindful Machines: A Wizard-of-Oz Dialogue Study

This paper presents an analysis of Wizard-of-Oz dialogues in light of the robot operator and proposes a design concept for spoken interaction based on the analysis. A robot controlled by an operator was equipped with a limited number of actions and a fixed set of short utterances. The spoken responses by the robot were slow-paced in comparison to natural human dialogues due to the operator's manual handling. As the robot spoke to Japanese participants in English, the participants experienced communication difficulties frequently. Nevertheless, they seemed to very much enjoy the interactions with the robot. We identify the two key factors in the operator's interaction tactics that enable this phenomenon.