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About

Silvan Mertes is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on vocal and non-verbal communication for social and android robots. His work addresses one of the field's most nuanced challenges: how robots can express intention, emotion, and personality through sound in ways that feel natural and relatable to human users. Mertes made an early mark with his 2019 paper on personalized synthesis of non-verbal sounds for social robots, which has accumulated 34 citations and introduced accessible, expert-free approaches to crafting emotionally expressive robot audio. This work laid the foundation for a broader research program exploring the alignment between a robot's voice and its physical appearance or identity. His subsequent investigations have pushed into increasingly sophisticated territory, examining gender ambiguity and anthropomorphism in robot voices, developing human-in-the-loop voice creation systems, and most recently exploring whether cloning a user's own voice can enhance their sense of connection to an android robot. Across these contributions, Mertes consistently foregrounds user experience and personalization, demonstrating that how a robot sounds is as consequential as how it looks. With a growing citation record and a clear trajectory toward voice-identity design in robotics, his work offers valuable insights for students and researchers at the intersection of HRI, speech technology, and affective computing.