EMOTIVE VOICE ACCEPTANCE IN HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION

Social robots are expected to interact with people in a natural and socially appropriate manner. Often, this will involve communicating by speech. An experiment with two social robots investigated how participants accepted different voices used by the robots and how they interpreted emotions expressed in those voices. A humanoid and a dinosaur robot used recorded human voices and synthesized voices to express seven different emotions while commenting on fairy tales read by the participants. The preliminary results of this study suggest that monotone synthesized voices are not well-suited to emotion-rich interactions, while regular speaking voices and expressive character voices both have relative strengths. We hope that this preliminary study can spark lively discussions on emotive robot voices in the ICAD community.

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