Design targeting voice interface robot capable of active listening

The EU, South Korea and Japan have a pressing need to compensate for growing labor shortages in their aging societies. There is growing awareness that robotic technology has the potential to ameliorate this problem in terms of both physical and mental labor. To take an example of mental labor, a human therapist dealing with elderly people must be an active listener. In order to realize a robot capable of active listening, we adopt Ivey´s basic listening sequence skills in microcounseling. In this paper, we describe a voice interface robot that realizes simple feedback, repeat feedback and questions for Ivey´s basic listening sequence. We conducted an experiment, whose results show that 69% of incidences of feedback have adequate reflective words for spoken sentences and 56% of questions are adequate for these reflective words.