Social robots, when used for information providing, are able to affect humans' trustworthiness and willingness to interact with them. In this work, we conducted an experimental study aimed at observing if the users' acceptance of recommendations, as well as their engagement in the interaction, is elicited when using a humanoid robot with respect to a common application on a mobile phone. We conducted an experimental study on movie recommendation where the two interfaces provide the same contents, but through different communication channels. In detail, the robot will attend to the participants in a socially contingent fashion, signaled via head and gaze orientation, speech, eye color and gestures related to the genre of the recommended movie, and the app will provide textual and graphical movie presentation. Results show that while the users perceive the interaction with the mobile application more natural, the social robot is able to enhance the users' satisfaction and provides a good and stable acceptance rate also when facing participants with various degrees of English proficiency.
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