The influence of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist

In this paper we present an experiment addressing the effect of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist. Twenty eight test participants interacted with two “female” robot characters: one with a high-pitched, exuberant voice, the other with a low-pitched, calm voice. Our results show that the high pitch robot was perceived significantly more attractive in terms of voice, behavior and personality. We also found that the increased level of the robot´s attractiveness induced significantly better ratings on the overall enjoyment and overall interaction quality. With our study we would like to stress the importance of the voice, in general (and the voice pitch, in particular) in the social robot design and to encourage further research in this topic within the HCI (in particular HRI - Human Robot Interaction) community.