What Does a Human Say to a Robot While They’re Building an IKEA Shelf Together?
Researchers at Chemnitz University of Technology explore human-robot conversations – and share their insights in a podcast episode
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Image: Vecteezy
Humans already cooperate closely with robots, for example in industrial settings. This is likely to increase in the future. But what do human-robot teams actually talk about at work? And how? "We want to know if people speak differently when they’re working in a team with a robot compared to a team with another human," says linguist Prof. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer from Chemnitz University of Technology. Her interdisciplinary team of researchers from neuro-robotics and linguistics conducted experiments in which human participants performed a task together with an industrial robot arm with speech functions. "The obvious choice was to have them assemble a simple IKEA shelf together, because that can be done even without instructions," reveals robotics engineer Sascha Kaden. "During the process, we recorded the teams and then transcribed and analysed everything they said," explains linguist Sasha Coelho.
As the researchers expected, purely human teams produced more statements, explanations and particularly questions, while the robot arm received more direct instructions than humans. "But we were surprised to find almost as many emotional statements in the human-robot teams as between humans." For example: "You're doing a good job."
The full study is now freely available online in open access. "I believe research like this is not only interesting for academics, but also for the general public," says Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer. "But there’s often not much room for explanations in research articles, which makes them harder to follow." That’s why the linguist provides engaging and accessible explanations of her recent publications in matching episodes of her podcast, "Linguistics Behind the Scenes". The latest episode focuses on artificial intelligence and the robot study.
Read the full paper at: Sasha Genevieve Coelho, Sascha Kaden, Marina Beccard, Florian Röhrbein & Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer. 2025. "Another bit. Upwards. Okay, stop." Do we talk differently to humans and robots when assembling a shelf together?, Proceedings of the Mensch und Computer 2025 (MuC '25), 465-470. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3743049.3748536
Listen to the podcast on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNsQsbYqQFs), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/1R7SB5BuqfoEQNk5cVZR7L) and Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/do-you-say-thank-you-to-a-robot-when-humans-talk-to-ai/id1799779038?i=1000725638252).
Information about the podcast “Linguistics Behind the Scenes”: https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/sections/edling/sciencecommunication/podcast.php
For any questions, please get in touch with Prof. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, tel. +49 (0)371 531-32444, email christina.sanchez@phil.tu-chemnitz.de.
(Translation: Prof. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer)
Mario Steinebach
15.09.2025
