More talking appliances will soon be available to communicate with humans in the domestic arena in the form of smart objects, research revealed.
Smart objects were established as home-friendly through the outcomes of research conducted with 63 subjects as a cognitive game study where reactions from lab workers towards talking smart objects were filmed.
New devices included a talking tissue box, with caring expressions such as “bless you” when you sneeze and a refrigerator which warns you when the food supplies are running low or rotten.
Haiyan Jia, doctoral candidate in mass communications at Penn State, United States, said: “We regularly communicate with objects by collecting data from those objects but we wanted to test what happens when objects talk directly to us in a social situation.”
Shyam Sundar, professor of communications at Penn State, said: “Smart objects will become more and more a part of our daily lives.”
Monitoring responses to interactive smart objects, the general outcomes of filmed observations showed subjects found it human-like and autonomous.
Most respondents found these objects similar to robots, though robots are deemed more human in both looks and actions.
Reactions were voice- rather than object-orientated, proving the human factor key in comebacks.
“We believe the next phase is that objects will start talking and interacting with humans, and our goal is to figure out the best ways for objects to communicate with humans,” Sundar added.
Findings were announced in a report released by the Penn State last week at the Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
