Long-Term Value of Social Robots through the Eyes of Expert Users

Dereshev, Dmitry, Kirk, David, Matsumura, Kohei and Maeda, Toshiyuki (2019) Long-Term Value of Social Robots through the Eyes of Expert Users. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19): May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. CHI (19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, p. 666. ISBN 9781450359702

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Abstract

Socially-enabled digital technologies have attracted academic interest for decades, with recent commercial examples of Siri and Alexa, capturing public attention. However, despite ubiquitous visions of a robotic future, very few fully-fledged social robots are currently available to consumers. To improve their designs, studies of their long-term use are particularly valuable, but are currently unavailable. To address this gap, we report on interviews with four long-term users of Pepper - a social robot introduced in 2014.

Our thematic analysis elicited insights across three kinds of value Pepper brought to its users: utilitarian functionality; the community that formed around Pepper; and a personal value of affection. We focus on two contributions those values bring to social robot design: social robots as social proxies, alleviating disabilities or acting akin to social media profiles; and robot nurturing as a design construct, going beyond purely utilitarian or hedonistic perspectives on robots.

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