Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) is an essential step towards autonomous human-robot interaction. It enables simulating and modeling the interaction, moreover it allows the collection of data and experimenting without relying on specific system components. In child-robot interaction studies with the WoZ setup, the wizard speaks with the children through the robot. Thus, it is essential that the voice characteristics of the wizard fits the robots morphology. To ensure this fit, we explore the relation between the morphology of two robots (Probo and Nao) and human expected robots voice. To be able to investigate the fitting voice, we have generated variations of voice styles by using a voice modification architecture which provides global spectral shifts and vocal tract modifications. Our results confirm that indeed there is an obvious relation between the morphology and the voice pitch. The proposed voice modification architecture has been used in a data collection experiments with children interacting with Nao in aWoZ setup, where the result of the voice style study is applied on the voice of the wizard.
Yilmazyildiz, S, Athanasopoulos, G, Patsis, G, Wang, W, Oveneke, M, Latacz, L, Verhelst, W, Sahli, H, Henderickx, D, Vanderborght, B, Soetens, E & Lefeber, D 2013, Voice Modification for Wizard-of-Oz Experiments in Robot-Child Interaction. in Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals (WASSS 2013). Grenoble, Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals, Grenoble, France, 23/08/13.
Yilmazyildiz, S., Athanasopoulos, G., Patsis, G., Wang, W., Oveneke, M., Latacz, L., Verhelst, W., Sahli, H., Henderickx, D., Vanderborght, B., Soetens, E., & Lefeber, D. (2013). Voice Modification for Wizard-of-Oz Experiments in Robot-Child Interaction. In Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals (WASSS 2013)
@inproceedings{c3fd0f527dab49acbaf2afe6f5cafa56,
title = "Voice Modification for Wizard-of-Oz Experiments in Robot-Child Interaction",
abstract = "Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) is an essential step towards autonomous human-robot interaction. It enables simulating and modeling the interaction, moreover it allows the collection of data and experimenting without relying on specific system components. In child-robot interaction studies with the WoZ setup, the wizard speaks with the children through the robot. Thus, it is essential that the voice characteristics of the wizard fits the robots morphology. To ensure this fit, we explore the relation between the morphology of two robots (Probo and Nao) and human expected robots voice. To be able to investigate the fitting voice, we have generated variations of voice styles by using a voice modification architecture which provides global spectral shifts and vocal tract modifications. Our results confirm that indeed there is an obvious relation between the morphology and the voice pitch. The proposed voice modification architecture has been used in a data collection experiments with children interacting with Nao in aWoZ setup, where the result of the voice style study is applied on the voice of the wizard.",
keywords = "voice modification, Wizard of Oz, human-robot interaction (HRI)",
author = "Selma Yilmazyildiz and Georgios Athanasopoulos and Georgios Patsis and Weiyi Wang and Meshia Oveneke and Lukas Latacz and Werner Verhelst and Hichem Sahli and David Henderickx and Bram Vanderborght and Eric Soetens and Dirk Lefeber",
year = "2013",
month = aug,
language = "English",
booktitle = "Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals (WASSS 2013)",
note = "Workshop on Affective Social Speech Signals, WASSS 2013 ; Conference date: 23-08-2013 Through 23-08-2013",
}