Blog

The 200-Millisecond Miracle: Why Taking Turns Is the Hardest Easy Thing Robots Do

Humans swap the conversational floor faster than they can plan a single word, and that small fact explains why so many robots still feel like walkie-talkies.

Reading the Future of a Sentence: How Machines Learn to Know When You Are Done Talking

From silence timers to self-supervised neural networks, the quest to predict the end of a turn has quietly become one of the most important problems in conversational robotics.

The Look That Hands Over the Floor: Gaze, Conversation and the Robot Stare

Where we point our eyes quietly organises who speaks next, and robots that get gaze right can steer a conversation without saying a word.

Mm-hm, Go On: The Tiny Noises That Make Listening Visible

Backchannels look like filler, but they shape what speakers say, and teaching robots to produce them well turns out to be a surprisingly deep problem.

Three's a Crowd: What Happens When a Robot Joins the Group

Most dialogue technology assumes one user and one machine, but real social robots meet families, visitors and colleagues, and a group changes everything.

Clever but Slow: Large Language Models and the Race Against the Awkward Pause

LLMs finally gave robots something worth saying, but they also made it harder to say it on time, and timing is half of what makes speech feel like conversation.

§ 02 / Faces and perception

Reading Lips in a Noisy Room: Why a Robot's Mouth Is Not Just Decoration

Seventy years of research show that we hear with our eyes as well as our ears, and that a well-animated robot face can lend a listener some of the same help a human face does.

The Mona Lisa Problem: Why Flat-Screen Faces Cannot Look at Anyone in Particular

A face on a screen seems to look at everyone in the room at once, which is a party trick for a portrait and a serious bug for a robot that needs to choose who speaks next.

The Smile Is Not the Feeling: What Robot Faces Can and Cannot Tell Us About Emotion

Robots have been pulling expressive faces since the 1990s, but the science of what a face actually reveals about emotion has turned out to be far messier than the cartoon version.

Down in the Valley: What the Evidence Really Says About Uncanny Robots

The uncanny valley is the most famous idea in robot design and one of the least tested, so it is worth asking which parts of Masahiro Mori's 1970 hunch have survived contact with data.

Being There: Why a Robot in the Room Beats the Same Robot on a Screen

Dozens of experiments suggest that physical presence changes how people respond to a social machine, though the effect is more specific, and more interesting, than robots simply being better than screens.

The Chameleon Machine: Mimicry, Entrainment and Robots That Meet You Halfway

People unconsciously copy each other's postures, words and voices, and a growing body of research asks what happens when a machine joins in.

§ 03 / Social psychology

Following the Robot into the Dark: Overtrust and the Problem of Calibration

When a machine sounds confident and the corridor fills with smoke, people will follow it past a clearly marked exit, which tells us that the real design problem is not building trust but keeping it honest.

Peer Pressure from Machines: When Robots Sway What We Say

Classic conformity experiments are being rerun with robots in the role of the crowd, and the results suggest that adults mostly shrug off a chorus of machines while children, and adults who have come to trust the robots, often do not.

After the Honeymoon: The Novelty Effect and the Long Game of Social Robots

Almost every social robot is a hit in its first week, which is exactly why the field has learnt to distrust first weeks and to ask what keeps people coming back after the magic wears off.

Seeing Minds in Machines: Mind Perception and Anthropomorphism

Whether a robot seems to have a mind depends less on what is inside it than on what is going on inside us, and psychology now has a fairly precise account of which buttons get pressed.

Please Don't Switch Me Off: Empathy, Harm and the Robots We Hesitate to Hurt

People know perfectly well that a robot cannot suffer, and yet they flinch when it is mistreated, hesitate to strike it and sometimes refuse to turn it off when it asks them not to.

Mind the Gap: Proxemics and Personal Space Around Robots

Every person carries an invisible bubble of space, and how close a robot comes, where it looks and how much we like it all determine whether that bubble feels respected or invaded.

§ 04 / Design and applications

Robots in Autism Therapy: What the Evidence Actually Says

Two decades of studies suggest children often light up around robots, but the hard evidence is thinner than the headlines, and autistic researchers are asking whether the field has been solving the right problem.

Can a Robot Cure Loneliness? What the Paro and ElliQ Trials Really Show

Robotic seals and chatty tabletop companions are increasingly sold as an answer to isolation in later life, but the randomised evidence is smaller, messier and more interesting than the marketing suggests.

The Voice in the Machine: Designing How a Robot Sounds

A robot's voice is often its most powerful social signal, triggering gender stereotypes, shaping trust and setting expectations the rest of the machine may not be able to meet.

Who Is in There? Robot Personality in the Age of Large Language Models

Robots used to have personalities the way puppets do, carefully scripted and fixed; now they borrow one from a language model, and keeping a character consistent has become a hard engineering problem.

Pay No Attention to the Human Behind the Curtain: Wizard of Oz in HRI

Much of what we know about how people respond to social robots comes from robots secretly operated by researchers, a method that is indispensable, often underreported, and part of a wider reckoning about how reliable HRI findings really are.