Talk to Kotaro: a web crowdsourcing study on the impact of phone and prosody choice for synthesized speech on human impression

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many research areas that require in person experiments with human volunteers have been impacted due to lockdowns and other activity-restricting policies. The field of robotics is no exception, and specially human-robot interaction research has been severely impacted. In order to circumvent the difficulty of gathering volunteers in person to interact with a robot, we have decided to build a novel crowdsourcing web platform for hosting our "Talk to Kotaro" experiment. The experiment consists of volunteers talking to a robot avatar and reacting to its semantic-free utterances. The developed web platform, which was built using the Python Flask framework, allows for such interactions while recording audio and video and other relevant data, which will be used for studying human impression estimation on gibberish speech. This paper describes not only the experiment and its preliminary results, but the developed platform itself; such tool is essential during pandemics and very useful for regular times, because it enables crowdsourcing data from all over the world.