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Empathetic Speech Synthesis and Testing for Healthcare Robots
International Journal of Social Robotics ( IF 4.7 ) Pub Date : 2020-09-11 , DOI: 10.1007/s12369-020-00691-4
Jesin James , B. T. Balamurali , Catherine I. Watson , Bruce MacDonald

One of the major factors that affect the acceptance of robots in Human-Robot Interaction applications is the type of voice with which they interact with humans. The robot’s voice can be used to express empathy, which is an affective response of the robot to the human user. In this study, the aim is to find out if social robots with empathetic voice are acceptable for users in healthcare applications. A pilot study using an empathetic voice spoken by a voice actor was conducted. Only prosody in speech is used to express empathy here, without any visual cues. Also, the emotions needed for an empathetic voice are identified. It was found that the emotions needed are not only the stronger primary emotions, but also the nuanced secondary emotions. These emotions are then synthesised using prosody modelling. A second study, replicating the pilot test is conducted using the synthesised voices to investigate if empathy is perceived from the synthetic voice as well. This paper reports the modelling and synthesises of an empathetic voice, and experimentally shows that people prefer empathetic voice for healthcare robots. The results can be further used to develop empathetic social robots, that can improve people’s acceptance of social robots.



中文翻译:

医疗机器人的移情语音合成与测试

影响人机交互应用中机器人接受度的主要因素之一是与人交互的声音类型。机器人的声音可以用来表达同理心,这是机器人对人类用户的情感反应。在这项研究中,目的是找出在医疗保健应用中用户是否可以接受具有同理心声音的社交机器人。进行了使用配音演员所说的善解人意的语音的试点研究。在这里,只有言语韵律用于表达同理心,没有任何视觉暗示。同样,识别出移情声音所需的情感。发现需要的情绪不仅是较强的主要情绪,而且还包括细微的次要情绪。然后使用韵律模型合成这些情绪。第二项研究 使用合成语音进行试点测试的复制,以调查是否也从合成语音中感受到了同理心。本文报道了移情语音的建模和综合,并通过实验表明人们对于医疗保健机器人更喜欢移情语音。结果可以进一步用于开发移情社交机器人,从而可以提高人们对社交机器人的接受度。

更新日期:2020-09-12
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