Enabling Shared Attention with Customers Strengthens a Sales Robot's Social Presence

Abstract

Humanlike robots interact with people in daily situations, and various studies concerning such robots have been conducted. However, robots are easily ignored due to their lack of social presence, with their customer service behavior and sales strategies not working well in many situations. In this paper, we aim to improve the social presence of a sales robot by enabling shared attention with visitors. In an actual shop, we investigated whether a robot could improve its social presence by indicating that it could understand the gaze direction of visitors. We found that the robot's statements regarding the direction of the visitor's gaze information and the timing of such statements with the visitor's gaze change improved the robot's social presence, leading to an increase in the number of groups that looked at the robot for a longer period. This paper reveals that enabling shared attention between humans and robots can strengthen a robot's social presence and its ability to work effectively in a real-world environment.