Can charismatic robots inspire teams to be more creative?
Social robots are increasingly being used to support educational settings. Does the sound of social robots affect their performance, particularly when they are working with human teams? Human creativity is heavily influenced by teamwork, which boosts collaboration and generates new ideas. Danish scientists wanted to know if robots with a voice that sounded charismatic could be better at facilitating team creativity.
\”We had a robotic assistant instructing teams of students on a creative task. \”The robot used either a confident and passionate tone of voice, or a normal matter-of fact tone of voice,\” explained Dr. Kerstin Fisher of the University of Southern Denmark. We found that students’ originality and creativity increased when the robot used a charismatic style of speaking.
We know social robots that act as facilitators can boost creative thinking, and we also know that their success is partly dependent on charisma. People respond to charismatic speeches by becoming more confident and engaging. Fischer and her co-workers wanted to know if the effect of charismatic speech could be replicated by social robot voices. They used a text-tospeech engineered with characteristics that are associated with charismatic talking, such as pitch ranges and ways of stressing words. Based on a variety of parameters that correlate with perceived speaker charm, two voices were created, one charismatic, and the other less expressive.
Source:
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-charismatic-robots-teams-creative.html
