Herme, Yet Another Interactive Conversational Robot

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.