Social RoboticsLLM-powered Pepper gets mixed reviews at a Canberra festival
Visitors liked the conversation but were put off by lag and a robot that could not read faces.
The University of Canberra's Collaborative Robotics Lab, with a sociologist from the Australian National University, gave Pepper language model capabilities and invited the public to talk to it at an innovation festival. Reported in Scientific Reports, reactions ranged from fascination to disappointment, grouped into themes around improvements, emotions, expectations and the robot's form. Slow responses and a mismatch between fluent speech and limited perception, such as holding eye contact without reacting to expressions, unsettled many people. The study is an early field test of what happens when chatbot-style AI is put inside an existing social robot.
This archive entry summarises reporting published elsewhere; follow the source link for the full story. The summary was drafted with AI from that reporting.