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Hearing a Nose?: User Expectations of Robot Appearance Induced by Different Robot Voices

Published: 01 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Congruence between the visual appearance of a robot and its behavioral and communicative characteristics has been shown to be a crucial determinant of user acceptance. Given the growing popularity of speech interfaces, a coherent design of a robot's looks and its voice is becoming more important. Which robot voice fits which appearance, however, has hardly been investigated to date. This is where the present research comes in. A randomized lab experiment was conducted, in which 165 participants listened to one of five more or less humanlike robot voices and subsequently drew a sketch corresponding to their imagination of the robot. The sketches were analyzed regarding the presence of various body features. While some features appeared in almost all drawings regardless of the condition (e.g., head, eyes), other features were significantly more prevalent in voice conditions characterized by low human-likeness (wheels) or high human-likeness (e.g., nose). Our results give first hints on which embodiment users might expect from different robotic voices.

References

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Goetz, J., Kiesler, S., & Powers, A. (2003). Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation. IEEE Int. Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN), 55--60.
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Mara, M., & Appel, M. (2015). Effects of lateral head tilt on user perceptions of humanoid and android robots. Computers in Human Behavior, 44, 326--334.
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McGinn, C., & Torre, I. (2019). Can you tell the robot by the voice? An exploratory study on the role of voice in the perception of robots. ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 211--221.
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Romportl, J. (2014). Speech synthesis and uncanny valley. In International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue (pp. 595--602). Springer, Cham.
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Cited By

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  • (2025)Affect-Enhancing Speech Characteristics for Robotic CommunicationInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-025-01221-wOnline publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Do Your Expectations Match? A Mixed-Methods Study on the Association Between a Robot's Voice and AppearanceProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665551(1-11)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Audio–Visual Predictive Processing in the Perception of Humans and RobotsInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-023-00990-615:5(855-865)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Hearing a Nose?: User Expectations of Robot Appearance Induced by Different Robot Voices

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      HRI '20: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
      March 2020
      702 pages
      ISBN:9781450370578
      DOI:10.1145/3371382
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Published: 01 April 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. empirical study
      2. experiment
      3. human-likeness
      4. human-robot interaction
      5. robot appearance
      6. robot voice
      7. sketch
      8. user expectation

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2025)Affect-Enhancing Speech Characteristics for Robotic CommunicationInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-025-01221-wOnline publication date: 17-Feb-2025
      • (2024)Do Your Expectations Match? A Mixed-Methods Study on the Association Between a Robot's Voice and AppearanceProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3640794.3665551(1-11)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
      • (2023)Audio–Visual Predictive Processing in the Perception of Humans and RobotsInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-023-00990-615:5(855-865)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
      • (2022)Robot Voices in Daily Life: Vocal Human-Likeness and Application Context as Determinants of User AcceptanceFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2022.78749913Online publication date: 13-May-2022
      • (2021)Voice in Human–Agent InteractionACM Computing Surveys10.1145/338686754:4(1-43)Online publication date: 3-May-2021

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