On depicting social agents.

We take up issues raised in the commentaries about our proposal that social robots are depictions of social agents. Among these issues are the realism of social agents, experiencing robots, communicating with robots, anthropomorphism, and attributing traits to robots. We end with comments about the future of social robots.

Social robots as depictions of social agents.

Social robots serve people as tutors, caretakers, receptionists, companions, and other social agents. People know that the robots are mechanical artifacts, yet they interact with them as if they were actual agents. How is this possible? The proposal here is that people construe social robots not as social agents , but as of social agents.

Anchoring Utterances.

For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that utterance. Doing this takes coordination. Producers must index each of these entities for their addressees, and addressees must identify each of the entities the producers are indexing.

Depicting as a method of communication.

In everyday discourse, people describe and point at things, but they also depict things with their hands, arms, head, face, eyes, voice, and body, with and without props. Examples are iconic gestures, facial gestures, quotations of many kinds, full-scale demonstrations, and make-believe play. Depicting, it is argued, is a basic method of communication.

Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking.

The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech.