Related papers: Robotic Speech Synthesis: Perspectives on Interact…
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…
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…
Robots make compulsory machine sounds, known as `consequential sounds', as they move and operate. As robots become more prevalent in workplaces, homes and public spaces, understanding how sounds produced by robots affect human-perceptions…
We report on our effort to create a corpus dataset of different social context situations in an office setting for further disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in computer vision, psychology, and human-robot-interaction. For social…
Integrating robots into populated environments is a complex challenge that requires an understanding of human social dynamics. In this work, we propose to model social motion forecasting in a shared human-robot representation space, which…
The use of social robots as instruments for social mediation has been gaining traction in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). So far, the design of such robots and their behaviors is often driven by technological platforms and…
Customizing voice and speaking style in a speech synthesis system with intuitive and fine-grained controls is challenging, given that little data with appropriate labels is available. Furthermore, editing an existing human's voice also…
Understanding how people interact with their surroundings and each other is essential for enabling robots to act in socially compliant and context-aware ways. While 3D Scene Graphs have emerged as a powerful semantic representation for…
Perceptions of gender are a significant aspect of human-human interaction, and gender has wide-reaching social implications for robots deployed in contexts where they are expected to interact with humans. This work explored two flexible…
Dialog systems are often designed or trained to output human-like responses. However, some responses may be impossible for a machine to truthfully say (e.g. "that movie made me cry"). Highly anthropomorphic responses might make users…
Imbuing machines with the ability to talk has been a longtime pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) research. From the very beginning, the community has not only aimed to synthesise high-fidelity speech that accurately conveys the…
Artificially intelligent systems, given a set of non-trivial ethical rules to follow, will inevitably be faced with scenarios which call into question the scope of those rules. In such cases, human reasoners typically will engage in…
Recent development in developing humanoid robot poses new challenges to human-machine interaction communication. A major challenge is to develop robots that can behave like and interact with human in the most natural way possible. This…
We humans are biased - and our robotic creations are biased, too. Bias is a natural phenomenon that drives our perceptions and behavior, including when it comes to socially expressive robots that have humanlike features. Recognizing that we…
Bots are software systems designed to support users by automating a specific process, task, or activity. When such systems implement a conversational component to interact with the users, they are also known as conversational agents. Bots,…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), effective communication between humans and robots is crucial for complex task execution. Traditional request-response systems often lack naturalness and may hinder…
Nowadays, robots are expected to interact more physically, cognitively, and socially with people. They should adapt to unpredictable contexts alongside individuals with various behaviours. For this reason, personalisation is a valuable…
This study investigated the effect of synthetic voice of conversational agent trained with spontaneous speech on human interactants. Specifically, we hypothesized that humans will exhibit more social responses when interacting with…
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…
Effective verbal communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration. When a robot helps its human partner to complete a task with verbal instructions, referring expressions are commonly employed during the interaction. Despite many…