Related papers: Robotic Speech Synthesis: Perspectives on Interact…
The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness,…
We propose and demonstrate the task of giving natural language summaries of the actions of a robotic agent in a virtual environment. We explain why such a task is important, what makes it difficult, and discuss how it might be addressed. To…
For a robot to act intelligently, it needs to sense the world around it. Increasingly, robots build an internal representation of the world from sensor readings. This representation can then be used to inform downstream tasks, such as…
We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action selection in…
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…
Social robots need intelligence in order to safely coexist and interact with humans. Robots without functional abilities in understanding others and unable to empathise might be a societal risk and they may lead to a society of socially…
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…
This paper identifies stylistic differences in instruction-giving observed in a corpus of human-robot dialogue. Differences in verbosity and structure (i.e., single-intent vs. multi-intent instructions) arose naturally without restrictions…
The aim of this workshop is two-fold. First, it aims to establish a research community focused on design and evaluation of synthetic speech (TTS) interfaces that are tailored not only to goal oriented tasks (e.g., food ordering, online…
In modern society, service robots are increasingly recognized for their wide range of practical applications. In large and crowded social spaces, such as museums and hospitals, these robots are required to safely move in the environment…
Robotic vision for human-robot interaction and collaboration is a critical process for robots to collect and interpret detailed information related to human actions, goals, and preferences, enabling robots to provide more useful services to…
This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user behaviors. In this study, our main focus is on assessing the…
This software project based paper is for a vision of the near future in which computer interaction is characterized by natural face-to-face conversations with lifelike characters that speak, emote, and gesture. The first step is speech. The…
This paper describes an experimental evaluation aimed at detecting the users' perception of the robot's empathic abilities during a conversation. The results have been then analyzed to search for a possible relationship between the…
Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen…
Autonomous intelligent agents are playing increasingly important roles in our lives. They contain information about us and start to perform tasks on our behalves. Chatbots are an example of such agents that need to engage in a complex…
Emerging applications of robotics, and concerns about their impact, require the research community to put human-centric objectives front-and-center. To meet this challenge, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach, socially cognizant…
Socially competent robots should be equipped with the ability to perceive the world that surrounds them and communicate about it in a human-like manner. Representative skills that exhibit such ability include generating image descriptions…
As part of the Human-Computer Interaction field, Expressive speech synthesis is a very rich domain as it requires knowledge in areas such as machine learning, signal processing, sociology, psychology. In this Chapter, we will focus mostly…
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…