Buzz-Buzz Chat: Encouraging Parent-Child Communication with Multiple-Agent Chats

Abstract

Children who attend university or work for a company often live away from their parents and have few opportunities to communicate with them. This is especially true in Japanese culture, given that the importance of not expressing emotions openly, and respecting other people's privacy creates personal distance. However, communication plays an important role in maintaining familial relationships and ascertaining family members' health by sharing daily life information. In this paper, we design "Buzz-Buzz Chat," an asynchronous communication system that encourages children and their parents to communicate about the children's cooking by using multiple-agent chats. Through a case study on a university student and his mother using Buzz-Buzz Chat, we find a novel method of remote communication with less burden, combining asynchronous dialogue about meals triggered by sharing cooking activities with dialogue about daily life and family in short intervals.