A Social Robot with Inner Speech for Dietary Guidance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Belcamino, Valerio, Carfì, Alessandro, Seidita, Valeria, Mastrogiovanni, Fulvio, Chella, Antonio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Belcamino, Valerio
Carfì, Alessandro
Seidita, Valeria
Mastrogiovanni, Fulvio
Chella, Antonio
author_facet Belcamino, Valerio
Carfì, Alessandro
Seidita, Valeria
Mastrogiovanni, Fulvio
Chella, Antonio
contents We explore the use of inner speech as a mechanism to enhance transparency and trust in social robots for dietary advice. In humans, inner speech structures thought processes and decision-making; in robotics, it improves explainability by making reasoning explicit. This is crucial in healthcare scenarios, where trust in robotic assistants depends on both accurate recommendations and human-like dialogue, which make interactions more natural and engaging. Building on this, we developed a social robot that provides dietary advice, and we provided the architecture with inner speech capabilities to validate user input, refine reasoning, and generate clear justifications. The system integrates large language models for natural language understanding and a knowledge graph for structured dietary information. By making decisions more transparent, our approach strengthens trust and improves human-robot interaction in healthcare. We validated this by measuring the computational efficiency of our architecture and conducting a small user study, which assessed the reliability of inner speech in explaining the robot's behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08664
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Social Robot with Inner Speech for Dietary Guidance
Belcamino, Valerio
Carfì, Alessandro
Seidita, Valeria
Mastrogiovanni, Fulvio
Chella, Antonio
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
We explore the use of inner speech as a mechanism to enhance transparency and trust in social robots for dietary advice. In humans, inner speech structures thought processes and decision-making; in robotics, it improves explainability by making reasoning explicit. This is crucial in healthcare scenarios, where trust in robotic assistants depends on both accurate recommendations and human-like dialogue, which make interactions more natural and engaging. Building on this, we developed a social robot that provides dietary advice, and we provided the architecture with inner speech capabilities to validate user input, refine reasoning, and generate clear justifications. The system integrates large language models for natural language understanding and a knowledge graph for structured dietary information. By making decisions more transparent, our approach strengthens trust and improves human-robot interaction in healthcare. We validated this by measuring the computational efficiency of our architecture and conducting a small user study, which assessed the reliability of inner speech in explaining the robot's behavior.
title A Social Robot with Inner Speech for Dietary Guidance
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08664