A Method to Obtain Seasonal Information for Smooth Communication Between Human and Chat Robot.

As the aging population grows worldwide, elderly people living alone increase rapidly, especially in Japan. The elderly people living alone leads to a decrease in communication and social contact. Decreasing in conversation might contribute to depression. To encourage communication, we developed a chat robot for elderly people as a prior research. However, the conversation did not smoothly proceed, since the robot cannot make utterances considering the season. In this background, seasonal information greatly influences the talk topic in Japan. Seasonal Information is different depending on the people, the robot needs to make an utterance suitable for user's value. Therefore, the purpose of this study is adjusting robot's utterance to user's values. This paper proposes a method that the robot directly obtains seasonal information from the user. Our experiment revealed the robot can obtain seasonal information suitable for the user by re-asking the user in dialogue. In addition, in order to automate this method, we implemented in Pepper.