Social robots as conversational catalysts: Enhancing long-term human-human interaction at home

The integration of social robots into family environments raises critical questions about their long-term influence on family interactions. This study explores the potential of social robots as conversational catalysts in human-human dyadic interaction, focusing on enhancing high-quality, reciprocal conversations between parents and children during dialogic coreading activities. With the increasing prevalence of social robots in homes and the recognized importance of parent-child exchanges for children's developmental milestones, this work presents a comprehensive empirical investigation involving more than 70 parent-child dyads over a period of 1 to 2 months. We examined the effects of three robot interaction styles-a passive robot listener, an active robot with a fixed behavior strategy, and an active robot with a strategy-switching mechanism-on parent-child conversational dynamics. Our findings reveal that a robot's active participation enhances the quality of parent-child dialogic conversations. The influence of robot facilitation varied on the basis of parental English proficiency. Strategy-switching robots provided greater benefits to non-native English-speaking families, whereas dyads with native English-speaking parents benefited more from fixed-strategy robots. Overall, this study highlights the promise of social robots that empower parents in fostering their children's dialogic development-a contrast with the prevalent design of educational robots that primarily target children. It provides critical insights into the equitable, nuanced design of long-term family-robot interactions at home, especially in supporting diverse family backgrounds.