Designing Robot Receptionist for Overcoming Poor Infrastructure, Low Literacy and Low Rate of Female Interaction
Talha Rehmani, Sabur Butt, Inam-ur-Rehman Baig, Mohammad Zubair Malik, Mohsen Ali · 2018
Developing countries in South Asia face unique economical and societal challenges such as poor infrastructure, low literacy and gender specific social norms. A particular concern is low participation of females in mixed gender activities. Any technological tool developed to improve accessibility of the population to the government and financial infrastructure needs to tackle these issues. In order to investigate design principles concerning these challenges, we are developing a culturally aware robot receptionist called ROSS (Robot Oriented Support Staff).The paper reports three studies on ROSS. We report our initial design effort, user interactions, strategies to engage low-literate users and female users, implementation decisions to deal with lack of services like internet connectivity, duration of interactions, rate of understanding, and rate of task completion. Findings from user experience survey indicate that culturally aware design can increase acceptability and interaction time. In the end we discuss possible future design changes in ROSS.