The soulless robot is operated by a person, making it more like a puppet. The contrast in the article between satisfaction with robot visits and “tablet visits” indicates a clear preference for the robot over the tablet. It doesn’t give any detail about what a “tablet visit” looks like though.

The “visited by preference list” probably looks like this:

  Costumed Human > Robot > Tablet > Nothing

I do think an interesting question is whether “random stranger not-in-character” beats “random stranger driving shiny robot.”