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Displaying a written transcript of what a human said (i.e. producing an "automatic speech recognition transcript") is a common feature for smartphone vocal assistants: the utterance produced by a human speaker (e.g. a question) is displayed…
Today, as seen in smart speakers, spoken dialogue technology is rapidly advancing to enable human-like interaction. However, current dialogue systems cannot pay attention not only to the content of speech, but also to the way of speaking…
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder find robots easier to communicate with than humans. Thus, robots have been introduced in autism therapies. However, due to the environmental complexity, the used robots often have to be controlled…
Humans are increasingly interacting with machines through language, sometimes in contexts where the user may not know they are talking to a machine (like over the phone or a text chatbot). We aim to understand how system designers and…
Facial expressiveness plays a crucial role in a robot's ability to engage and interact with children. Prior research has shown that expressive robots can enhance child engagement during human-robot interactions. However, many robots used in…
In human-robot collaboration, robot errors are inevitable -- damaging user trust, willingness to work together, and task performance. Prior work has shown that people naturally respond to robot errors socially and that in social…
Many children experience challenges in emotional regulation and social interaction, which can limit their participation in everyday activities and therapeutic programs. For socially assistive robots to be effective in this context, it is…
We study voiced laughter in executive communication and its effect on social approval. Integrating research on laughter, affect-as-information, and infomediaries' social evaluations of firms, we hypothesize that voiced laughter in executive…
Despite great advances in what robots can do, they still experience failures in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high randomness in unstructured human environments. Moreover, a human's unfamiliarity with a robot and its abilities can…
A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…
Understanding the intentions of robots is essential for natural and seamless human-robot collaboration. Ensuring that robots have means for non-verbal communication is a basis for intuitive and implicit interaction. For this, we contribute…
Often robots are seen as a means to an end to fulfill a logical objective task. Android robots, on the other hand, provide new possibilities to fulfill emotional tasks and could therefore be integrated into assistive scenarios. We explored…
One of the first and foremost non-verbal interactions that humans perform is a handshake. It has an impact on first impressions as touch can convey complex emotions. This makes handshaking an important skill for the repertoire of a social…
To enable robots to instruct humans in collaborations, we identify several aspects of language processing that are not commonly studied in this context. These include location, planning, and generation. We suggest evaluations for each task,…
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…
Social assistive robots are starting to be widely used in pediatric health-care environments with the aim of distracting and entertaining children, and so of reducing a possible state of anxiety. In this paper, we present some initial…
Despite recent advances in robotics and human-robot collaboration in the AEC industry, trust has mostly been treated as a static factor, with little guidance on how it changes across events during collaboration. This paper investigates how…
Despite significant improvements in robot capabilities, they are likely to fail in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high unpredictability in human environments and varying human expectations. In this work, we explore the role of…
Efforts towards endowing robots with the ability to speak have benefited from recent advancements in natural language processing, in particular large language models. However, current language models are not fully incremental, as their…
Laughter is one of the most expressive and natural aspects of human speech, conveying emotions, social cues, and humor. However, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems lack the ability to produce realistic and appropriate laughter sounds,…