Title
Creating Robot Personality: Effects of Mixing Speech and Semantic Free Utterances
Abstract
Personality is a vital factor in understanding acceptance, trust or emotional attachment to a robot. From R2D2 to WALL-E, there is a rich history of robots in films using semantic free utterances (SFUs) sounds (such as squeaks, clicks and tones) as audio gestures to communicate and convey emotion and personality. However, unlike in a film where an actor can pretend to understand non-verbal noises, in a practical application synthesised speech is often used to communicate information, intention and status. Here we present a pilot study exploring the impact of mixing speech synthesis with SFUs on perceived personality. In a listening test, subjects were presented with synthesised short utterances with and without SFUs, together with a picture of the agent as a tabletop social robot or a young man. Both picture and SFUs had an impact on perceived personality. However, no interaction was seen between SFUs and picture suggesting the listeners failed to fuse the perceptions of the two audio elements, perceiving the SFUs as background noises rather than audio gestures generated by the agent.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3371382.3378330
HRI '20: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Cambridge United Kingdom March, 2020
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
speech synthesis, social robots, personification
Conference
2167-2121
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-7057-8
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matthew P. Aylett1936237.25
Yolanda Vazquez-Alvarez211511.67
Skaiste Butkute300.34