The Benefits of Sound Resound: An In-Person Replication of the Ability of Character-Like Robot Sound to Improve Perceived Social Warmth

While robot sound is known to impact perceptions of robots, little research to date has addressed the topic of robot sound. In particular, there are few in-person studies surrounding the topic. To expand existing robotic sound research, we conducted an in-person empirical study with $N=30$ participants, as a partial replication of a past online study. We sought to better understand the effects that character-like and functional sounds have on human teammates' perceptions of a robot during a joint in-person task. Participants rated the robot with character-like sound as more socially warm compared against a no-added-sound condition; this result was akin to insights from our previous work that showed benefits of transformative robot sound for warmth and other factors across multiple robot platforms. Additional evidence newly presented in this work also suggests the increased localizability of robots with augmented sonic profiles. The partial replication in the results strengthens our lab's past findings on robot sound, especially as related to character-like robot sound's ability to improve perceived robot warmth. This work can help to inform designers and researchers who are interested in enhancing robot interactions via nonverbal robot expression.