Image/Shutterstock.com
By Angharad Brewer Gillham, Frontiers science author
Increasingly, social robots are getting used for help in instructional contexts. But does the sound of a social robotic have an effect on how nicely they carry out, particularly when coping with groups of people? Teamwork is a key think about human creativity, boosting collaboration and new concepts. Danish scientists got down to perceive whether or not robots utilizing a voice designed to sound charismatic can be extra profitable as staff creativity facilitators.
“We had a robot instruct teams of students in a creativity task. The robot either used a confident, passionate — ie charismatic — tone of voice or a normal, matter-of-fact tone of voice,” mentioned Dr Kerstin Fischer of the University of Southern Denmark, corresponding creator of the research in Frontiers in Communication. “We found that when the robot spoke in a charismatic speaking style, students’ ideas were more original and more elaborate.”
Can a robotic be charismatic?
We know that social robots performing as facilitators can enhance creativity, and that the success of facilitators is at the very least partly depending on charisma: folks reply to charismatic speech by turning into extra assured and engaged. Fischer and her colleagues aimed to see if this impact might be reproduced with the voices of social robots by utilizing a text-to-speech operate engineered for traits related to charismatic talking, corresponding to a selected pitch vary and approach of stressing phrases. Two voices have been developed, one charismatic and one much less expressive, based mostly on a spread of parameters which correlate with perceived speaker charisma.
The scientists recruited 5 courses of college college students, all taking programs which included a component of staff creativity. The college students have been instructed that they have been testing a creativity workshop, which concerned brainstorming concepts based mostly on photographs after which utilizing these concepts to provide you with a brand new chocolate product. The workshop was led by movies of a robotic talking: introducing the duty, reassuring the groups of scholars that there have been no dangerous concepts, after which congratulating them for finishing the duty and asking them to fill out a self-evaluation questionnaire. The questionnaire evaluated the robotic’s efficiency, the scholars’ personal views on how their teamwork went, and the success of the session. The creativity of every session, as measured by the variety of unique concepts produced and the way elaborate they have been, was additionally measured by the researchers.
Powering creativity with charisma
The group that heard the charismatic voice rated the robotic extra positively, discovering it extra charismatic and interactive. Their notion of their teamwork was extra optimistic, they usually produced extra unique and elaborate concepts. They rated their teamwork extra extremely. However, the group that heard the non-charismatic voice perceived themselves as extra resilient and environment friendly, probably as a result of a much less charismatic chief led to higher group by the staff members themselves, although they produced fewer concepts.
“I had suspected that charismatic speech has very important effects, but our study provides clear evidence for the effect of charismatic speech on listener creativity,” mentioned Dr Oliver Niebuhr of the University of Southern Denmark, co-author of the research. “This is the first time that such a link between charismatic voices, artificial speakers, and creativity outputs has been found.”
The scientists identified that though the periods with the charismatic voice have been usually extra profitable, not all of the groups responded identically to the totally different voices: earlier experiences of their totally different courses might have affected their response. Larger research shall be wanted to know how these exterior elements affected staff efficiency.
“The robot was present only in videos, but one could suspect that more exposure or repeated exposure to the charismatic speaking style would have even stronger effects,” mentioned Fischer. “Moreover, we have only varied a few features between the two robot conditions. We don’t know how the effect size would change if other or more features were varied. Finally, since charismatic speaking patterns differ between cultures, we would expect that the same stimuli will not yield the same results in all languages and cultures.”
Frontiers Journals & Blog