Isolation of physical traits and conversational content for personality design

In this paper, we propose the “Doppel teleoperation system,” which isolates several physical traits from a speaker, to investigate how personal information is conveyed to others during conversation. An underlying problem on designing personality in social robots is that it remains unclear how humans judge the personalities of conversation partners. With the Doppel system, for each of the communication channels to be transferred, one can choose it in its original form or in the one generated by the system. For example, voice and body motions can be replaced by the Doppel system while preserving the speech content. This allows us to analyze the individual effects of the physical traits of the speaker and the content in the speaker´s speech on the identification of personality. This selectivity of personal traits provides a useful approach to investigate which information conveys our personality through conversation. To show the potential of our system, we experimentally tested how much the conversation content conveys the personality of speakers to interlocutors without any of their physical traits. Preliminary results show that although interlocutors have difficulty identifying speakers only using conversational contents, they can recognize their acquaintances when their acquaintances are the speakers. We point out some potential physical traits to convey personality.