Empirical Evaluation of Service Robot for Library Helpdesk Using Cloud Computing Services with Artificial Intelligence

This study presents a library service robot rapidly developed using cloud artificial intelligence (AI) services and empirically demonstrates the robot’s service in a public library. The developed robot system interacts with a cloud service for speech recognition and synthesis with high accuracy and low latency over a short duration. The robot has been in operation for three years in a university library. To conduct demonstration experiments at a public library, a book search system that does not use personal information was used, which differs from the system that has been in operation at the university library for several years. In addition, for the demonstration experiment at the public library, we formally negotiated with the library and set conditions such as the questioning method for the verification experiment. We show the feasibility of the proposed system with a spoken dialogue service robot by conducting demonstration experiments in the university and public libraries.