Related papers: Emotional Storytelling using Virtual and Robotic A…
Can vocal emotions be emulated? This question has been a recurrent concern of the speech community, and has also been vigorously investigated. It has been fueled further by its link to the issue of validity of acted emotion databases. Much…
We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked to…
Emotions and their evolution play a central role in creating a captivating story. In this paper, we present the first study on modeling the emotional trajectory of the protagonist in neural storytelling. We design methods that generate…
This paper presents a study of the dynamic coupling between a user and a virtual character during body interaction. Coupling is directly linked with other dimensions, such as co-presence, engagement, and believability, and was measured in…
This study presents a comparative framework for evaluating emotional engagement with textile soft robots and their augmented-reality (AR) counterparts. Four robotic sculptures were developed, each embodying nature-inspired dynamic behaviors…
Recently, large language models have facilitated the emergence of highly intelligent conversational AI capable of engaging in human-like dialogues. However, a notable distinction lies in the fact that these AI models predominantly generate…
Recent years have witnessed great progress on building emotional chatbots. Tremendous methods have been proposed for chatbots to generate responses with given emotions. However, the emotion changes of the user during the conversation has…
Vast improvements in natural language understanding and speech recognition have paved the way for conversational interaction with computers. While conversational agents have often been used for short goal-oriented dialog, we know little…
Recent research on human robot interaction explored whether people's tendency to conform to others extends to artificial agents (Hertz & Wiese, 2016). However, little is known about to what extent perception of a robot as having a mind…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
In this chapter, we provide a review of conversational agents (CAs), discussing chatbots, intended for casual conversation with a user, as well as task-oriented agents that generally engage in discussions intended to reach one or several…
Since the late 1990s when speech companies began providing their customer-service software in the market, people have gotten used to speaking to machines. As people interact more often with voice and gesture controlled machines, they expect…
We present READ Avatars, a 3D-based approach for generating 2D avatars that are driven by audio input with direct and granular control over the emotion. Previous methods are unable to achieve realistic animation due to the many-to-many…
How should a companion robot behave? In this research, we present a cognitive architecture based on a tailored personality model to investigate the impact of robotic personalities on the perception of companion robots. Drawing from existing…
For generative AI to succeed, how engaging a conversationalist must it be? For almost sixty years, some conversational agents have responded to any question or comment to keep a conversation going. In recent years, several utilized machine…
Task-oriented conversational systems are essential for efficiently addressing diverse user needs, yet their development requires substantial amounts of high-quality conversational data that is challenging and costly to obtain. While large…
When deploying interactive agents like (social) robots in public spaces they need to be able to interact with a diverse audience, with members each having individual diversity characteristics and prior experiences with interactive systems.…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly involve continual learning to enable flexibility in general situations that are not encountered during system training. Human interaction with autonomous systems is broadly studied, but research…
Interview chatbots engage users in a text-based conversation to draw out their views and opinions. It is, however, challenging to build effective interview chatbots that can handle user free-text responses to open-ended questions and…