Related papers: Whither the Priors for (Vocal) Interactivity?
We are approaching a future where social robots will progressively become widespread in many aspects of our daily lives, including education, healthcare, work, and personal use. All of such practical applications require that humans and…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
With an increasing need for elderly and disability care, there is an increasing opportunity for intelligent and mobile devices such as robots to provide care and support solutions. In order to naturally assist and interact with humans, a…
Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots…
Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…
Contemporary approaches to perception, planning, estimation, and control have allowed robots to operate robustly as our remote surrogates in uncertain, unstructured environments. This progress now creates an opportunity for robots to…
In order to create effective storytelling agents three fundamental questions must be answered: first, is a physically embodied agent preferable to a virtual agent or a voice-only narration? Second, does a human voice have an advantage over…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
Human-robot interaction often occurs in the form of instructions given from a human to a robot. For a robot to successfully follow instructions, a common representation of the world and objects in it should be shared between humans and the…
Increasingly complex and autonomous robots are being deployed in real-world environments with far-reaching consequences. High-stakes scenarios, such as emergency response or offshore energy platform and nuclear inspections, require robot…
Communication between humans and artificial agents is essential for their interaction. This is often inspired by human communication, which uses gestures, facial expressions, gaze direction, and other explicit and implicit means. This work…
Conversational practice, while crucial for all language learners, can be challenging to get enough of and very expensive. Chatbots are computer programs developed to engage in conversations with humans. They are designed as software avatars…
Recognition of social signals, from human facial expressions or prosody of speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user…
How can multiple humans interact with multiple robots? The goal of our research is to create an effective interface that allows multiple operators to collaboratively control teams of robots in complex tasks. In this paper, we focus on a key…
Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…
One of the long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to build an agent that can communicate intelligently with human in natural language. Most existing work on natural language learning relies heavily on training over a pre-collected…
Recently, research in human-robot interaction began to consider a robot's influence at the group level. Despite the recent growth in research investigating the effects of robots within groups of people, our overall understanding of what…
Strategies are necessary to mitigate the impact of unexpected behavior in collaborative robotics, and research to develop solutions is lacking. Our aim here was to explore the benefits of an affective interaction, as opposed to a more…
Humans are easily conscious of small differences in an android robot's (AR's) behaviors and utterances, resulting in treating the AR as not-human, while ARs treat us as humans. Thus, there exists asymmetric communication between ARs and…
In general, self help systems are being increasingly deployed by service based industries because they are capable of delivering better customer service and increasingly the switch is to voice based self help systems because they provide a…