How should Pepper sound - Preliminary investigations on robot vocalizations

Abstract

We describe a perception experiment as a preliminary investigation toidentify an appropriate vocal expression for a robot interacting with autistic children. 18 audio tracks with different voice characteristics but the same text weregenerated using speech synthesizers and acoustic modification and then used asover dubs for a short video of a robot. When participants in a perception experi-ment were asked how far the audio fits with the robot and how agreeable it sounds,most selected less artificial sounding samples.