Toward sociable robots

This paper explores the topic of social robots—the class of robots that people anthropomorphize in order to interact with them. From the diverse and growing number of applications for such robots, a few distinct modes of interaction are beginning to emerge. We distinguish four such classes: socially evocative, social interface, socially receptive, and sociable. For the remainder of the paper, we explore a few key features of sociable robots that distinguish them from the others. We use the vocal turn-taking behavior of our robot, Kismet, as a case study to highlight these points.