Haru He's Here to Help! A Demonstration of Implementing Comedic Rapid Turn-taking for a Social Robot

Current robot dialog systems are predominantly implemented using a sequential, utterance based, two-party, speak-wait/speak-wait approach. This is inadequate for any interaction where rapid timed turn-taking is required. In this demo we show how a conversational listener can support a comedy dialogue with the social robot 'Haru'. The system depends on fast local word-spotting and can be extended to support scripted and semi-scripted interactions where conversational timing is important such as fictive dialogues for educational purposes, or to support acting within a story telling context. The system could also be integrated with a full dialogue manager for non-scripted open dialogue applications.