Time delay effects of utterance to communicative actions on greeting interaction by using a voice-driven embodied interaction system

The timing to generate communicative actions and utterance in face--to-face greetings are analyzed by synthesis. First, the analysis of the greeting experiment clarifies that utterance of human is delayed for 0.3 sec to communicative actions. Then, the analysis by synthesis by using an embodied robot confirms that the variation of the lags of utterance to communicative actions brings different communicative effects, i.e. about 0.3 sec lag is desirable for single greetings, and the longer lag is for polite greetings. This result demonstrates the importance of the timing in human-robot embodied communication.