Abstract
Social robots have been used to perform the role of storytellers in areas like education and pediatric rehabilitation. With the use of this technology, it is possible to setup different voices, simulate emotional states and even personalities for the same robot. However, finding the best setting that might define a trait for a storyteller robot, is not an easy task. What elements should be manipulated? Should it have a personality? If yes, which one? In this work, we try to answer these questions by studying several setups that will allow us to create an assertive social robot to act as a storyteller. We evaluate the assertiveness impression by manipulating three robot characteristics: posture, pitch, and speech rate. A within-subject study was conducted with 37 participants watching eight videos in which a social robot tells a short story. In each video, the robot presents a different setup, and the participant reports the level of assertiveness of that robot. We found a significant difference between the setups of pitch and posture as well as an acceptable assertive robot’s configuration using a combination of those three characteristics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The Wise Rabbit. Born 1980, M, from Islamabad, Pakistan. https://www.storystar.com/story/11499/talha/fiction/drama-interest-2.
- 2.
Pitch and speech rate values were chosen from the prosody elements. https://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/#S3.2.4.
References
Apple, W., Streeter, L.A., Krauss, R.M.: Effects of pitch and speech rate on personal attributions. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 37(5), 715 (1979)
Bradley, J.H., Hebert, F.J.: The effect of personality type on team performance. J. Manag. Dev. 16(5), 337–353 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1108/02621719710174525. https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/10.1108/02621719710174525
Costa, P.T., McCrae, R.R.: Revised NEO personality inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEP five-factor inventory (NEO-FFI): professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources Lutz, FL (1992)
Devillers, L., Vasilescu, I.: Prosodic cues for emotion characterization in real-life spoken dialogs. In: Eighth European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (2003)
Figueiredo, R., Brisson, A., Aylett, R., Paiva, A.: Emergent stories facilitated. In: Spierling, U., Szilas, N. (eds.) ICIDS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5334, pp. 218–229. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89454-4_29
Kȩdzierski, J., Muszyński, R., Zoll, C., Oleksy, A., Frontkiewicz, M.: Emys-emotive head of a social robot. Int. J. Soc. Robot. 5(2), 237–249 (2013)
Kimble, C.E., Seidel, S.D.: Vocal signs of confidence. J. Nonverbal Behav. 15(2), 99–105 (1991)
Kory, J.J.M.: Storytelling with robots: effects of robot language level on children’s language learning. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014)
Lubold, N., Pon-Barry, H., Walker, E.: Naturalness and rapport in a pitch adaptive learning companion. In: 2015 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), pp. 103–110. IEEE, December 2015. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASRU.2015.7404781
Martinez, L., Falvello, V.B., Aviezer, H., Todorov, A.: Contributions of facial expressions and body language to the rapid perception of dynamic emotions. Cogn. Emot. 30(5), 939–952 (2016)
Moon, Y., Nass, C.: How real are computer personalities? Commun. Res. 23(6), 651–674 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1177/009365096023006002. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009365096023006002
Mori, M., MacDorman, K.F., Kageki, N.: The uncanny valley [from the field]. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 19(2), 98–100 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811
Mutlu, B., Forlizzi, J., Hodgins, J.: A storytelling robot: modeling and evaluation of human-like gaze behavior. In: 2006 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, pp. 518–523. IEEE (2006)
Nass, C., Moon, Y., Fogg, B.J., Reeves, B., Dryer, C.: Can computer personalities be human personalities? In: Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 1995, pp. 228–229. ACM Press, New York (1995). https://doi.org/10.1145/223355.223538. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=223355.223538
Niculescu, A., van Dijk, B., Nijholt, A., See, S.L.: The influence of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist. In: 2011 International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr ), pp. 18–23, November 2011. https://doi.org/10.1109/iUSEr.2011.6150529
Niculescu, A., Van Dijk, B., Nijholt, A., See, S.L.: The influence of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist. In: 2011 International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr), pp. 18–23. IEEE (2011)
Ozaeta, L., Graña, M.: On intelligent systems for storytelling. In: Graña, M., et al. (eds.) SOCO’18-CISIS’18-ICEUTE’18 2018. AISC, vol. 771, pp. 571–578. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94120-2_56
Page, R.A., Balloun, J.L.: The effect of voice volume on the perception of personality. J. Soc. Psychol. 105(1), 65–72 (1978)
Paradeda, R.B., Martinho, C., Paiva, A.: Persuasion based on personality traits: using a social robot as storyteller. In: Proceedings of the Companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 367–368, HRI 2017. ACM, New York (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3029798.3034824. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3029798.3034824
Paterson, R.: The Assertiveness Workbook: How to Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships. New Harbinger Publications, Oakland (2000)
Plaisant, C., et al.: A storytelling robot for pediatric rehabilitation. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies, pp. 50–55. ACM (2000)
Ramirez, M.A.: Interactive storytelling in the library. (Chophayom J.) 27, 87–94 (2016)
Reeves, B., Nass, C.I.: The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge University Press, New York (1996)
Rodero, E.: Intonation and emotion: influence of pitch levels and contour type on creating emotions. J. Voice 25, e25–e34 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2010.02.002
Sprole, S.: 5 principles of Speaking With More Assertiveness - Accent Artisan. http://accentartisan.com/article/assertiveness/
Striepe, H., Lugrin, B.: There once was a robot storyteller: measuring the effects of emotion and non-verbal behaviour. In: Kheddar, A., et al. (eds.) ICSR 2017. LNCS, vol. 10652, pp. 126–136. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70022-9_13
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) program Science without border: 201833/2014-0 - Brazil and Agência Regional para o Desenvolvimento e Tecnologia (ARDITI) - M1420-09-5369-000001, for PhD grants to first and second authors respectively. This work was also supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia: (FCT) - UID/CEC/50021/2013 and the project AMIGOS:PTDC/EEISII/7174/2014.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Paradeda, R., Ferreira, M.J., Martinho, C., Paiva, A. (2018). Communicating Assertiveness in Robotic Storytellers. In: Rouse, R., Koenitz, H., Haahr, M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_51
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_51
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04027-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04028-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)