Assessing the effects of building social intelligence in a robotic interface for the home

This paper reports an exploration of the concept of social intelligence in the context of designing home dialogue systems for an Ambient Intelligence home. It describes a Wizard of Oz experiment involving a robotic interface capable of simulating several human social behaviours. Our results show that endowing a home dialogue system with some social intelligence will: (a) create a positive bias in the user's perception of technology in the home environment, (b) enhance user acceptance for the home dialogue system, and (c) trigger social behaviours by the user in relation to the home dialogue system.