Watching TV not only provides news information but also gives an opportunity for different generations to communicate. With the proliferation of smartphones, PC, and the Internet, increase the opportunities for communication in front of the television is also likely to diminish. This has led to some problems further from face-to-face such as a lack of self-control and insufficient development of communication skills. This paper proposes a TV-watching companion robot with open-domain chat ability. The robot contains two modes: TV-watching mode and conversation mode. In TV-watching mode, the robot first extracts keywords from the TV program and then generates the disclosure utterances based on the extracted keywords as if enjoying the TV program. In the conversation mode, the robot generates question utterances with keywords in the same way and then employs a topics-based dialog management method consisting of multiple dialog engines for rich conversations related to the TV program. We conduct the initial experiments and the result shows that all participants from the three groups enjoyed talking with the robot, and the question about their interests in the robot was rated 6.5/7-levels. This indicates that the proposed conversational features of TV-watching Companion Robot have the potential to make our daily lives more enjoyable. Under the analysis of the initial experiments, we achieve further experiments with more participants by dividing them into two groups: a control group without a robot and an intervention group with a robot. The results show that people prefer to talk to robots because the robot will bring more enjoyable, relaxed, and interesting.

翻译：看电视不仅提供新闻信息，也为不同代人创造了交流机会。随着智能手机、个人电脑和互联网的普及，电视前的沟通机会可能随之减少。这进一步导致缺乏自控能力、沟通技能发展不足等面对面交流缺失的问题。本文提出一种具备开放式对话能力的看电视伴侣机器人。该机器人包含两种模式：看电视模式和对话模式。在电视观看模式下，机器人首先从电视节目中提取关键词，然后基于这些关键词生成评述性话语，仿佛正在享受电视节目。而在对话模式下，机器人以相同方式利用关键词生成疑问句，并采用由多个对话引擎组成的基于主题的对话管理方法，以实现与电视节目相关的丰富对话。初步实验结果显示，三组参与者均表示乐于与机器人交谈，关于机器人兴趣度的评分达到6.5/7级。这表明所提出的看电视伴侣机器人的对话特性具有让日常生活更愉悦的潜力。基于初步实验分析，我们进一步开展了更大规模的实验，将参与者分为两组：无机器人的对照组和有机器人的干预组。结果表明，人们更倾向于与机器人交谈，因为机器人能带来更多愉悦感、放松感和趣味性。