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A design of trip recommendation robot agents with opinions

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Abstract

In this paper, we conducted experiments with trip recommendation agents. The travel industry offers potential roles for robots and virtual agents. Also, product recommendation on websites is one of the themes gathering attention in the field of virtual agents. Thus, providing methods for designing trip recommendation robots or agents for websites is important. We focused on two factors for agents: appearance and whether the agents expressed an opinion or not. We constructed three kinds of appearance: human-like, robot-like, and real. Also, we constructed two types of recommendation text: with the agents’ opinion and without. We conducted an experiment on the web to verify these two factors on the recommendation effect. The experimental design was two factors and two and three levels; thus, there were six conditions. We conducted a two-way ANOVA to verify the effect of each factor. As a result, we revealed that the robot-like agent and physical robot were more effective than the human-like agent in trip recommendation, and agents’ expressing their opinion was not effective in itself for trip recommendation. This result could suggest useful methods for designing robots and agents that recommend trips on websites.

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Notes

  1. https://www.vstone.co.jp/products/sota/

  2. https://sites.google.com/view/vpvp/

  3. https://www.ah-soft.com/voiceroid/

  4. http://www.vstone.co.jp/sotamanual/index.php

  5. https://crowdsourcing.yahoo.co.jp/

  6. https://crowdsourcing.yahoo.co.jp/

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by JST, CREST (JPMJCR21D4), Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka city, Osaka, Japan

    Tetsuya Matsui

  2. National Institute of Informatics, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Seiji Yamada

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  1. Tetsuya Matsui
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  2. Seiji Yamada
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Correspondence to Tetsuya Matsui.

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Matsui, T., Yamada, S. A design of trip recommendation robot agents with opinions. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 41861–41877 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14747-w

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