Related papers: No More Mumbles: Enhancing Robot Intelligibility t…
How should a robot speak in a formal, quiet and dark, or a bright, lively and noisy environment? By designing robots to speak in a more social and ambient-appropriate manner we can improve perceived awareness and intelligence for these…
In noisy environments, speech can be hard to understand for humans. Spoken dialog systems can help to enhance the intelligibility of their output, either by modifying the speech synthesis (e.g., imitate Lombard speech) or by optimizing the…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
While the use of social robots for language teaching has been explored, there remains limited work on a task-specific synthesized voices for language teaching robots. Given that language is a verbal task, this gap may have severe…
Voice is an essential modality for human-robot interaction (HRI). The way a robot sounds plays a central role in shaping how humans perceive and engage with it, influencing factors such as intelligibility, understandability, and likability.…
In their everyday life, the speech recognition performance of human listeners is influenced by diverse factors, such as the acoustic environment, the talker and listener positions, possibly impaired hearing, and optional hearing devices.…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked 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…
When people try to influence others to do something, they subconsciously adjust their speech to include appropriate emotional information. In order for a robot to influence people in the same way, the robot should be able to imitate the…
A robot needs contextual awareness, effective speech production and complementing non-verbal gestures for successful communication in society. In this paper, we present our end-to-end system that tries to enhance the effectiveness of…
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important aspect of effective human-robot collaboration and received a lot of attention from the research community. For example, many neural network-based architectures were proposed recently and…
Social robots are required not only to understand human intentions but also to effectively communicate their intentions or own internal states to users. This study explores the use of sonification to provide explicit auditory feedback,…
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…
As humanoid service robots are becoming more and more perceptible in public service settings for instance as a guide to welcome visitors or to explain a procedure to follow, it is desirable to improve the comprehensibility of complex issues…
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…
We introduce Vocal Sandbox, a framework for enabling seamless human-robot collaboration in situated environments. Systems in our framework are characterized by their ability to adapt and continually learn at multiple levels of abstraction…
Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living. Speech…
Explanations constitute an important aspect of successful human robot interactions and can enhance robot understanding. To improve the understanding of the robot, we have developed four levels of explanation (LOE) based on two questions:…
Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…