[Paper]
The integration of large language models (LLMs) with social robots has emerged as a promising avenue for enhancing human-robot interactions at a time when news reports generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are gaining in credibility. This integration is expected to intensify and become a more productive resource for journalism, media, communication, and education. In this paper a novel system is proposed that integrates AI’s generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model with the Pepper robot, with the aim of improving the robot’s natural language understanding and response generation capabilities for enhanced social interactions. By leveraging GPT’s powerful language processing capabilities, this system offers a comprehensive pipeline that incorporates voice input recording, speech-to-text transcription, context analysis, and text-to-speech synthesis action generation. The Pepper robot is enabled to comprehend user queries, generate informative responses with general knowledge, maintain contextually relevant conversations, and act as a more domain-oriented news reporter. It is also linked with a news resource and powered with a Google search capability. To evaluate the performance of the framework, experiments were conducted involving a set of diverse questions. The robot’s responses were assessed on the basis of eight criteria, including relevance, context, and fluency. Despite some identified limitations, this system contributes to the field of journalism and human-robot interaction by showcasing the potential of integrating LLMs with social robots. The proposed framework opens up opportunities for improving the conversational capabilities of robots, enabling interactions that are smoother, more engaging, and more context aware.