Related papers: Kawaii Game Vocalics: A Preliminary Model
The Japanese notion of "kawaii" or expressions of cuteness, vulnerability, and/or charm is a global cultural export. Work has explored kawaii-ness as a design feature and factor of user experience in the visual appearance, nonverbal…
"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of…
Kawaii computing is a new term for a steadily growing body of work on the Japanese notion of "cute" in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice. Kawaii is distinguished from general notions of cute by its experiential and…
Role-playing chatbots built on large language models have drawn interest, but better techniques are needed to enable mimicking specific fictional characters. We propose an algorithm that controls language models via an improved prompt and…
Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming a feature of our everyday life. Yet, the user experience (UX) is often limited, leading to underuse, disengagement, and abandonment. Co-designing interactions for VAs with potential end-users can be…
Recent research has begun to assess people's perceptions of voice user interfaces (VUIs) as dialogue partners, termed partner models. Current self-report measures are only available in English, limiting research to English-speaking users.…
Conversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work…
Game-playing AI research has focused for a long time on learning to play video games from visual input or symbolic information. However, humans benefit from a wider array of sensors which we utilise in order to navigate the world around us.…
Japanese character figurines are popular and have pivot position in Otaku culture. Although numerous robots have been developed, less have focused on otaku-culture or on embodying the anime character figurine. Therefore, we take the first…
With the advancement of conversational AI, research on bodily expressions, including gestures and facial expressions, has also progressed. However, many existing studies focus on photorealistic avatars, making them unsuitable for…
Evaluating 'anime-like' voices currently relies on costly subjective judgments, yet no standardized objective metric exists. A key challenge is that anime-likeness, unlike naturalness, lacks a shared absolute scale, making conventional Mean…
Voice is a natural mode of expression offered by modern computer-based systems. Qualitative perspectives on voice-based user experiences (voice UX) offer rich descriptions of complex interactions that numbers alone cannot fully represent.…
This study extracted and analyzed the linguistic speech patterns that characterize Japanese anime or game characters. Conventional morphological analyzers, such as MeCab, segment words with high performance, but they are unable to segment…
Computer voice is experiencing a renaissance through the growing popularity of voice-based interfaces, agents, and environments. Yet, how to measure the user experience (UX) of voice-based systems remains an open and urgent question,…
Chatbots are popular machine partners for task-oriented and social interactions. Human-human computer-mediated communication research has explored how people express their gender and sexuality in online social interactions, but little is…
We present pathways of investigation regarding conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for children in the classroom. We highlight anticipated challenges to be addressed in order to advance knowledge on CUIs for children. Further, we discuss…
The quality of human voice plays an important role across various fields like music, speech therapy, and communication, yet it lacks a universally accepted, objective definition. Instead, voice quality is referred to using subjective…
Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly being integrated into children's everyday lives, not only through screens but also through so-called "screen-free" AI toys. These toys can simulate emotions, personalize responses, and recall prior…
The global population is rapidly aging, necessitating technologies that promote healthy aging. Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), leveraging natural language interaction, offer a promising solution for older adults due to their ease of use.…
Voice assistants (VAs) are typically evaluated through task performance metrics and self-report questionnaires, but people's voices themselves carry rich paralinguistic cues that reveal affect, effort, and interaction breakdowns. We present…