Abstract
Spoken communication between social robotic devices, powered by generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, and the senior population offers great potential for researching social interaction and robot identity perceptions as well as exploring the potential opportunities and challenges when implementing this human-machine interactions in real life situations and health care. In this paper we explore people’s perceptions of the social robot Furhat when administering verbal tasks similar to those used in screening for Alzheimer’s disease. We describe the Slovak system mounted on the robot that includes a speech recognizer, the scenarios powered by generative large language model ChatGPT, and a speech synthesizer. We tested the functionality of the proposed approach with two groups of participants: attendees of a large science fair and a scientific conference. The observations from 87 collected questionnaires suggest good potential and applicability of such an approach for the given task and more positive attitudes of older subjects compared to younger ones.
Funding source: Agentúra na Podporu Výskumu a Vývoja
Award Identifier / Grant number: APVV-21-037
Funding source: European Cooperation in Science and Technology
Award Identifier / Grant number: CA19102 - Language In The Human-Machine Era
Funding source: Vedecká Grantová Agentúra MŠVVaŠ SR a SAV
Award Identifier / Grant number: 2/0165/21
Funding source: HORIZON EUROPE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions
Award Identifier / Grant number: Project Cobra No 859588
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Research funding: This work was supported by APVV under the project APVV-21-0373 Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease from speech using artificial intelligence and social robotics; the work is also co-funded by VEGA project No 2/0165/21, EU ITN MSCA project Cobra No 859588 and COST MVTS CA19102 – Language In The Human-Machine Era (LITHME).
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Declaration: All individuals listed as authors qualify as authors and have approved the submitted version. Their work is original and is not under consideration by any other journal. They have permission to reproduce any previously published material.
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