The right kind of unnatural: designing a robot voice

Matthew P. Aylett; Selina Jeanne Sutton; Yolanda Vazquez-Alvarez

doi:10.1145/3342775.3342806

The right kind of unnatural: designing a robot voice

Matthew P. Aylett, Selina Jeanne Sutton, Yolanda Vazquez-Alvarez

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Any system using voice to communicate becomes personified by that voice. For robots, where the form and non-vocal behaviour also strongly personify the system, we can see a clash between the two technologies. The many challenges in building responsive and interactive robots mean that language systems are often designed in a vacuum and when they are finally brought together can ruin the look, feel and sound of the completed system. This problem is intensified by natural language processing technology which can further add inappropriate behaviours following mythical business use cases, rather than exploring how users really would like to relate and use embodied artificial systems. In this positional paper, we present two studies in robot voice design and a non-vocal use case of the Honda Research Institute robot Haru. Finally, we ask the question what sort of voice should Haru have?

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 1st international conference on conversational user interfaces
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Print)	9781450371872
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3342775.3342806
Publication status	Published - 22 Aug 2019

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title = "The right kind of unnatural: designing a robot voice",

abstract = "Any system using voice to communicate becomes personified by that voice. For robots, where the form and non-vocal behaviour also strongly personify the system, we can see a clash between the two technologies. The many challenges in building responsive and interactive robots mean that language systems are often designed in a vacuum and when they are finally brought together can ruin the look, feel and sound of the completed system. This problem is intensified by natural language processing technology which can further add inappropriate behaviours following mythical business use cases, rather than exploring how users really would like to relate and use embodied artificial systems. In this positional paper, we present two studies in robot voice design and a non-vocal use case of the Honda Research Institute robot Haru. Finally, we ask the question what sort of voice should Haru have?",

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AU - Sutton, Selina Jeanne

AU - Vazquez-Alvarez, Yolanda

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N2 - Any system using voice to communicate becomes personified by that voice. For robots, where the form and non-vocal behaviour also strongly personify the system, we can see a clash between the two technologies. The many challenges in building responsive and interactive robots mean that language systems are often designed in a vacuum and when they are finally brought together can ruin the look, feel and sound of the completed system. This problem is intensified by natural language processing technology which can further add inappropriate behaviours following mythical business use cases, rather than exploring how users really would like to relate and use embodied artificial systems. In this positional paper, we present two studies in robot voice design and a non-vocal use case of the Honda Research Institute robot Haru. Finally, we ask the question what sort of voice should Haru have?

AB - Any system using voice to communicate becomes personified by that voice. For robots, where the form and non-vocal behaviour also strongly personify the system, we can see a clash between the two technologies. The many challenges in building responsive and interactive robots mean that language systems are often designed in a vacuum and when they are finally brought together can ruin the look, feel and sound of the completed system. This problem is intensified by natural language processing technology which can further add inappropriate behaviours following mythical business use cases, rather than exploring how users really would like to relate and use embodied artificial systems. In this positional paper, we present two studies in robot voice design and a non-vocal use case of the Honda Research Institute robot Haru. Finally, we ask the question what sort of voice should Haru have?

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M3 - Conference contribution

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BT - Proceedings of the 1st international conference on conversational user interfaces

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

ER -

The right kind of unnatural: designing a robot voice

Abstract

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