A Feasibility Study of Culture-Aware Cloud Services for Conversational Robots

Cultural competence - i.e., the capability to adapt verbal and non-verbal interaction to the user's cultural background - may be a key element for social robots to increase the user experience. However, designing and implementing culturally competent social robots is a complex task, given that advanced conversational skills are required. In this context, Cloud services may be useful for helping robots in generating appropriate interaction patterns in a culture-aware manner. In this letter, we present the design and the implementation of the CARESSES Cloud, a set of robotic services aimed at endowing robots with cultural competence in verbal interaction. A preliminary evaluation of the Cloud services as a general dialoguing system for culture-aware social robots has been performed, analyzing the feasibility of the architecture in terms of communication and data processing delays.