Abstract
Designing a voice for a social robot is particularly challenging because the voice needs to convincingly convey a target personality while maintaining rich, emotive capabilities in order to foster the development of bonds with humans. In this paper, we describe the ongoing design and implementation process of a voice for a social robot. To aid in our design and analysis, we identify three desirable characteristics for its voice: 1. convincingness, 2. emotiveness, and 3. consistency. In this paper, we present a preliminary study that investigates convincingness by comparing samples taken from human voice talents and eliciting human judgements about their appropriateness. This study compares human judgements, elicited through surveys, on a range of characteristics related to convincingness, emotions conveyed, and impressions of the overall consistency of the voice. Finally, we discuss the implications of the survey findings for designing a voice for a social robot.
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\(p<0.05\) as measured by a single-tail t-test.
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Nichols, E., Siskind, S.R., Kamino, W., Šabanović, S., Gomez, R. (2021). Iterative Design of an Emotive Voice for the Tabletop Robot Haru. In: Li, H., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_31
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