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I'm a Robot, Hear Me Speak!

Published: 13 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

How should a robot speak in warm, cold, loud or bright environments? We propose a demonstration that allows participants to experience how varied background ambient contexts (i.e., lighting, sound, background) can affect the acceptability of robot voice styles, including pitch range, speed, and pauses. We demonstrate the technical result of a 3-step voice design process: (a) Collecting human voice data under the varied ambient conditions, (b) Clustering human vocal utterances to identify primary voice styles, and (c) Modifying a robot voice to the clustered voice styles. The demo will allow participants to experience a food service scenario in 6 different ambient conditions, and feel how changing the robot's voice style can affect both intelligibility and social appropriateness. Ultimately, we hope to highlight the importance in adapting a robot's vocal characteristics to ambient contexts, towards deploying robots in the wild.

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MP4 File (demo1011.mp4)
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References

[1]
Kerstin Fischer, Lakshadeep Naik, Rosalyn M. Langedijk, Timo Baumann, Matou? Jelínek, and Oskar Palinko. 2021. Initiating Human-Robot Interactions Using Incremental Speech Adaptation. In HRI. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 421--425.
[2]
Akira Hayamizu, Michita Imai, Keisuke Nakamura, and Kazuhiro Nakadai. 2014. Volume Adaptation and Visualization by Modeling the Volume Level in Noisy Environments for Telepresence System. In HAI. ACM.
[3]
Anna Henschel, Guy Laban, and Emily Cross. 2021. What Makes a Robot Social? A Review of Social Robots from Science Fiction to a Home or Hospital Near You. Curr. Robot. Rep. 2 (2021).
[4]
Stanislav Ivanov, Ulrike Gretzel, Katerina Berezina, Marianna Sigala, and Craig Webster. 2019. Progress on robotics in hospitality and tourism: a review of the literature. J. Hosp. Tour. Technol. (2019).
[5]
Nichola Lubold, Erin Walker, and Heather Pon-Barry. 2016. Effects of voiceadaptation and social dialogue on perceptions of a robotic learning companion. In HRI. 255--262.
[6]
Ilaria Torre, Adrian Benigno Latupeirissa, and Conor McGinn. 2020. How context shapes the appropriateness of a robot's voice. In ROMAN. 215--222.

Cited By

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  • (2024)Mind the voice! The effect of service robot voice vividness on service failure toleranceJournal of Travel & Tourism Marketing10.1080/10548408.2024.242509542:1(1-19)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Finding its Voice: The Influence of Robot Voice on Fit, Social Attributes, and Willingness to Use Among Older Adults in the U.S. and Japan2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309390(2072-2079)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '23: Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 2023
612 pages
ISBN:9781450399708
DOI:10.1145/3568294
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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 March 2023

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  1. ambiance
  2. human-robot interaction
  3. voice adaptation

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  • NSERC

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HRI '23
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Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Mind the voice! The effect of service robot voice vividness on service failure toleranceJournal of Travel & Tourism Marketing10.1080/10548408.2024.242509542:1(1-19)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Finding its Voice: The Influence of Robot Voice on Fit, Social Attributes, and Willingness to Use Among Older Adults in the U.S. and Japan2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309390(2072-2079)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023

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