Related papers: Whither the Priors for (Vocal) Interactivity?
While multi-robot systems have been broadly researched and deployed, their success is built chiefly upon the dependency on network infrastructures, whether wired or wireless. Aiming at the first steps toward de-coupling the application of…
There have been incredible advancements in robotics and spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) over the past few years, yet we still don't find social robots in public spaces like train stations, shopping malls, or hospital waiting rooms. In this…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Recent advancements have enabled human-robot collaboration through physical assistance and verbal guidance. However, limitations persist in coordinating robots' physical motions and speech in response to real-time changes in human behavior…
Trust plays a central role in human--robot collaboration, yet its formation is rarely examined under the constraints of fully autonomous interaction. This pilot study investigated how interaction policy influences trust during in-person…
Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
Voice assistants have recently achieved remarkable commercial success. However, the current generation of these devices is typically capable of only reactive interactions. In other words, interactions have to be initiated by the user, which…
The number of robots deployed in our daily surroundings is ever-increasing. Even in the industrial set-up, the use of coworker robots is increasing rapidly. These cohabitant robots perform various tasks as instructed by co-located human…
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…
Inner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process which refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argue that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system, which simulates human inner…
A few decades of work in the AI field have focused efforts on developing a new generation of systems which can acquire knowledge via interaction with the world. Yet, until very recently, most such attempts were underpinned by research which…
In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…
Current research in robotic sounds generally focuses on either masking the consequential sound produced by the robot or on sonifying data about the robot to create a synthetic robot sound. We propose to capture, modify, and utilise rather…
Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally…
Natural language is an effective tool for communication, as information can be expressed in different ways and at different levels of complexity. Verbal commands, utilized for instructing robot tasks, can therefor replace traditional robot…
Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…
A conversational agent (chatbot) is a piece of software that is able to communicate with humans using natural language. Modeling conversation is an important task in natural language processing and artificial intelligence. While chatbots…
As multiple robots are expected to coexist in future households, natural language is increasingly envisioned as a primary medium for human-robot and robot-robot communication. This paper introduces the concept of a Natural Language…
The ability of a machine to communicate with humans has long been associated with the general success of AI. This dates back to Alan Turing's epoch-making work in the early 1950s, which proposes that a machine's intelligence can be tested…