Related papers: Whither the Priors for (Vocal) Interactivity?
Interruptions, a fundamental component of human communication, can enhance the dynamism and effectiveness of conversations, but only when effectively managed by all parties involved. Despite advancements in robotic systems, state-of-the-art…
Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess…
Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of Voice User Interfaces. However, user surveys suggest that there are issues with respect to usability, and it has been hypothesised that contemporary voice-enabled systems are…
Ambiguity and noise in natural language instructions create a significant barrier towards adopting autonomous systems into safety critical workflows involving humans and machines. In this paper, we propose to build on recent advances in…
All robots create consequential sound -- sound produced as a result of the robot's mechanisms -- yet little work has explored how sound impacts human-robot interaction. Recent work shows that the sound of different robot mechanisms affects…
Intelligent agents have great potential as facilitators of group conversation among older adults. However, little is known about how to design agents for this purpose and user group, especially in terms of agent embodiment. To this end, we…
Dialogue systems, also called chatbots, are now used in a wide range of applications. However, they still have some major weaknesses. One key weakness is that they are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with…
Effective collaboration between a robot and a person requires natural communication. When a robot travels with a human companion, the robot should be able to explain its navigation behavior in natural language. This paper explains how a…
Positive human-perception of robots is critical to achieving sustained use of robots in shared environments. One key factor affecting human-perception of robots are their sounds, especially the consequential sounds which robots (as…
Humanoid robots have apparently similar body structure like human beings. Due to their technical design, they are sharing the same workspace with humans. They are placed to clean things, to assist old age people, to entertain us and most…
Emotion expressions serve as important communicative signals and are crucial cues in intuitive interactions between humans. Hence, it is essential to include these fundamentals in robotic behavior strategies when interacting with humans to…
Integrating generative AI such as Large Language Models into social robots has improved their ability to engage in natural, human-like communication. This study presents a method to examine their persuasive capabilities. We designed an…
The paper asserts that emulating empathy in human-robot interaction is a key component to achieve satisfying social, trustworthy, and ethical robot interaction with older people. Following comments from older adult study participants, the…
Humans often work closely together and relay a wealth of information through physical interaction. Robots, on the other hand, are not yet able to work similarly closely with humans and to effectively convey information when engaging in…
Comprehension of spoken natural language is an essential component for robots to communicate with human effectively. However, handling unconstrained spoken instructions is challenging due to (1) complex structures including a wide variety…
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…
Humans use audio signals in the form of spoken language or verbal reactions effectively when teaching new skills or tasks to other humans. While demonstrations allow humans to teach robots in a natural way, learning from trajectories alone…
As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to accomplish a tremendous range of tasks. It is not feasible for robot designers to pre-program these behaviors or know them in advance, so one way to address this is through…
This paper aims to develop a semi-formal design space for Human-AI interactions, by building a set of interaction primitives which specify the communication between users and AI systems during their interaction. We show how these primitives…
Robots in shared workspaces must interpret human actions from partial, ambiguous observations, where overconfident early predictions can lead to unsafe or disruptive interaction. This challenge is amplified in egocentric views, where…