Engaging bots help increase employee productivity

How can your employer make your workday a little happier? More rest, less work or a raise? But forget all that, because it looks like companies are planning to use robot trainers to motivate their employees.

New experiments on how robots interact with employees show how the solution can boost morale. This experiment hinges on one fundamental factor; robot charisma.

Mikul Spitale“We want to take the robots out of the lab and see how these tools work in the real world,” a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge said in a press release detailing the results of his team’s experiments on the human-robot. interaction. explain. ,

Report FuturismThe University of Cambridge research team met with 26 employees and two types of robots for four weeks. The bot helped each workgroup recall a positive experience in their career, and then asked them additional questions. Both bots speak in the same text, with the same voice, and use the same phrases.

But the difference between the two robots in the experiment above is their size. The researchers found that the toy-like robot Misty did a good job of connecting with employees. He hypothesized that the appearance of the 14-inch-tall robot would dampen people’s expectations for interacting with it. But the second robot, called QT, is more human-like and about a meter tall, so the staff had higher expectations. In fact, this study showed that employees were less satisfied when they interacted with QT.

The researchers said in a statement that people’s expectations for robots do not match reality. Hutis gun“We programmed the bots with the same text, but wanted the participants to interact with them more,” explains the University of Cambridge Research Assistant and Professor of Emotional Intelligence and Robotics.

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