Comparing a Social Robot and a Mobile Application for Movie Recommendation: A Pilot Study

Social robots can be used as interfaces to provide recommendations to users. While a vast literature compares the user’s behavior when interacting with a robot with respect to a virtual agent, in this paper, we conduct a first evaluation on how the user’s choices are affected if the recommendations are provided respectively by a mobile application or by social robots with different degree of interaction capabilities. This pilot study shows that the sole embodiment condition of the robot does not imply significant changes in the users’ choices that prefer to interact with the mobile application. However, the adoption of additional communication channels such as gestures, gaze and voice pitch, which change accordingly to the suggested movie genre, improves the users acceptability.