Expansion in speech time can restore comprehension in a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot.

In this study, the development of a social robot, capable of giving speech simultaneously in more than one language was in mind. However, the negative effect of background noise on speech comprehension is well-documented in previous works. This deteriorating effect is more highlighted when the background noise has speech-like properties.

Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot's voice.

With fast and reliable international transportation, more people with different language backgrounds can interact now. As a result, the need for communicative agents fluent in several languages to assist those people is highlighted. The high cost of hiring human attendants fluent in several languages makes using social robots a more affordable alternative in international gatherings.

Effect of robot's vertical body movement on its perceived emotion: A preliminary study on vertical oscillation and transition.

The emotion expressions of social robots are some of the most important developments in recent studies on human-robot interactions (HRIs). Several research studies have been conducted to assess effective factors to improve the quality of emotion expression of the robots. In this study, we examined the effects of a robot's vertical oscillation and transition on the quality of its emotion expression, where the former indicates the periodic up/down movement of the body of the robot, while the latter indicates a one-time up or down movement.

Multiple Groups of Agents for Increased Movement Interference and Synchronization.

We examined the influence of groups of agents and the type of avatar on movement interference. In addition, we studied the synchronization of the subject with the agent. For that, we conducted experiments utilizing human subjects to examine the influence of one, two, or three agents, as well as human or robot avatars, and finally, the agent moving biologically or linearly.

A Preliminary Study on Realizing Human-Robot Mental Comforting Dialogue via Sharing Experience Emotionally.

Mental health issues are receiving more and more attention in society. In this paper, we introduce a preliminary study on human-robot mental comforting conversation, to make an android robot (ERICA) present an understanding of the user's situation by sharing similar emotional experiences to enhance the perception of empathy. Specifically, we create the emotional speech for ERICA by using CycleGAN-based emotional voice conversion model, in which the pitch and spectrogram of the speech are converted according to the user's mental state.

Communication Apprehension and Eye Contact Anxiety in Video Conferences Involving Teleoperated Robot Avatars: A Subjective Evaluation Study.

Communication apprehension (CA), defined as anxiety in oral communication, and anxiety in eye contact (AEC), defined as the discomfort felt in communication while being stared at by others, limit communication effectiveness. In this study, we examined whether using a teleoperated robot avatar in a video teleconference provides communication support to people with CA and AEC. We propose a robotic telecommunication system in which a user has two options to produce utterance for own responses in online interaction with interviewer i.

Ostensive-Cue Sensitive Learning and Exclusive Evaluation of Policies: A Solution for Measuring Contingency of Experiences for Social Developmental Robot.

Joint attention related behaviors (JARBs) are some of the most important and basic cognitive functions for establishing successful communication in human interaction. It is learned gradually during the infant's developmental process, and enables the infant to purposefully improve his/her interaction with the others. To adopt such a developmental process for building an adaptive and social robot, previous studies proposed several contingency evaluation methods, by which an infant robot becomes able to sequentially learn some primary social skills.