Generating Robotic Speech Prosody for Human Robot Interaction: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The use of affective speech in robotic applications has increased in recent years, especially regarding the developments or studies of emotional prosody for a specific group of people. The current work proposes a prosody-based communication system that considers the limited parameters found in speech recognition for the elderly, for example. This work explored what types of voices were more effective for understanding presented information, and if the affects of robot voices reflected on the emotional states of listeners. By using functions of a small humanoid robot, two different experiments conducted to find out comprehension level and the affective reflection respectively. University students participated in both tests. The results showed that affective voices helped the users understand the information, as well as that they felt corresponding negative emotions in conversations with negative voices.

Keywords

• speech prosody
• human robot interaction
• emotions
• elderly care
• social robot