Title :
Herme, Yet Another Interactive Conversational Robot
Author :
Jinguang Han ; Gilmartin, Emer ; Campbell, Nick
Author_Institution :
Speech Commun. Lab., Trinity Coll. Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Abstract :
Herme, the talking robot developed at the Speech Communication Lab in Trinity College Dublin collected almost 500 signed consent forms from casual visitors to the TCD Science Gallery over a three-month period in 2012. Herme is a small LEGO device supporting a web cam and programmed to talk to any people who come within her range of view. She films the interaction and after chatting with her new ´friends´ for about three minutes, tries to persuade them to sign an ethics committee consent form allowing the researchers in her lab to analyse the audio-video recordings of the conversation in order to better understand how people might interact with machines in the future. This demonstration showcases work being carried out at the Speech Communication Lab under SFI funding on the FASTNET project, with a Focus on Actions in Social Talk, linking computer speech synthesis with different forms of speech and image processing to make inferences about the success of an ongoing conversation. The corpus of recordings of conversations collected at the Science Gallery provides essential insights into how human social interaction follows clearly defined patterns that can be taken advantage of in advanced speech technology. The demonstration presented at ACII 2013 will allow participants to engage with Herme and judge her competence for themselves.
Keywords :
audio recording; human-robot interaction; humanoid robots; image processing; interactive systems; robot programming; robot vision; speech processing; speech synthesis; video recording; Dublin; FASTNET project; Herme; LEGO device; SFI funding; Speech Communication Lab; TCD Science Gallery; Trinity College; advanced speech technology; audio-video recordings; computer speech synthesis; human social interaction; image processing; interactive conversational robot; speech processing; talking robot; webcam; Computers; Robot sensing systems; Speech; Synthesizers; Timing; Webcams; casual social interaction; data collection device; dialogue system; interactive speech; portable robot platform;
Conference_Titel :
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2013 Humaine Association Conference on
Conference_Location :
Geneva
DOI :
10.1109/ACII.2013.127