Related papers: I Know You're Listening: Adaptive Voice for HRI
We present the first text-to-speech (TTS) system tailored to second language (L2) speakers. We use duration differences between American English tense (longer) and lax (shorter) vowels to create a "clarity mode" for Matcha-TTS. Our…
Humans vary their expressivity when speaking for extended periods to maintain engagement with their listener. Although social robots tend to be deployed with ``expressive'' joyful voices, they lack this long-term variation found in human…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
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…
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.…
Social robots aim to establish long-term bonds with humans through engaging conversation. However, traditional conversational approaches, reliant on scripted interactions, often fall short in maintaining engaging conversations. This paper…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced in recent years, driving innovation across various fields, especially in robotics. Even though robots can perform complex tasks with increasing autonomy, challenges remain in ensuring…
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:…
World models have demonstrated impressive performance on robotic learning tasks. Many such tasks inherently demand multimodal reasoning; for example, filling a bottle with water will lead to visual information alone being ambiguous or…
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,…
Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…
Robots operating in shared human environments must not only navigate, interact, and detect their surroundings, they must also interpret and respond to dynamic, and often unpredictable, human behaviours. Although recent advances have shown…
The rapid growth of voice assistants powered by large language models (LLM) has highlighted a need for speech instruction data to train these systems. Despite the abundance of speech recognition data, there is a notable scarcity of speech…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in real-world settings need to handle imperfect audio, often degraded by hardware limitations or environmental noise, while accommodating diverse user groups. In human-robot interaction (HRI),…
We experiment with a low-latency, end-to-end voice-to-voice communication model to optimize it for real-time conversational applications. By analyzing components essential to voice to voice (V-2-V) system viz. automatic speech recognition…
Robot sound, encompassing both consequential operational noise and intentionally designed auditory cues, plays an important role in human-robot interaction (HRI). Developing a deeper understanding of how robot sounds influence human…
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…
This paper presents an overview of robot failure detection work from HRI and adjacent fields using failures as an opportunity to examine robot explanation behaviours. As humanoid robots remain experimental tools in the early 2020s,…
Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more…
Speech-driven facial animation is important for many applications including TV, film, video games, telecommunication and AR/VR. Recently, transformers have been shown to be extremely effective for this task. However, we identify two issues…