With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human–robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language interaction capabilities is still very limited. In this article, based on the report of an interdisciplinary workshop convened by the National Science Foundation, we identify key scientific and engineering advances needed to enable effective spoken language interaction with robotics. We make 25 recommendations, involving eight general themes: putting human needs first, better modeling the social and interactive aspects of language, improving robustness, creating new methods for rapid adaptation, better integrating speech and language with other communication modalities, giving speech and language components access to rich representations of the robot’s current knowledge and state, making all components operate in real time, and improving research infrastructure and resources. Research and development that prioritizes these topics will, we believe, provide a solid foundation for the creation of speech-capable robots that are easy and effective for humans to work with.

随着机器人技术的快速发展，越来越需要更有效的人机交互来实现机器人对社会的全部潜力。虽然口语必须是解决方案的一部分，但我们提供口语交互能力的能力仍然非常有限。在本文中，根据美国国家科学基金会召集的跨学科研讨会的报告，我们确定了实现与机器人有效口语交互所需的关键科学和工程进展。我们提出了 25 条建议，涉及 8 个一般主题：将人类需求放在首位，更好地模拟语言的社交和交互方面，提高鲁棒性，创建快速适应的新方法，更好地将语音和语言与其他交流方式相结合，让语音和语言组件访问机器人当前知识和状态的丰富表示，使所有组件实时运行，并改善研究基础设施和资源。我们相信，优先考虑这些主题的研究和开发将为创建具有语音功能的机器人提供坚实的基础，这些机器人对人类来说既简单又有效。