Online Evaluation of Text to Speech Systems for Three Social Robots

The success of social robots is mainly based on their capacity for interaction with people. In this regard, verbal and non-verbal communication skills are essential for social robots to get a natural human-robot interaction. This paper focuses on the first of them since the majority of social robots implement a Text to Speech system. We present a comparative study of 8 off-the-shelf systems used in social robots where 125 participants evaluated the performance of the systems. The results show that, in general, the participants detect differences between the Text to Speech systems, being able to determine which are the more intelligible, expressive, and artificial ones. Besides, the participants also conclude that there are some systems more suitable than others depending on the physical appearance of the robots.

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