The Influence of Voice Pitch on the Evaluation of a Social Robot Receptionist

A.I. Niculescu, Elisabeth M.A.G. van Dijk, Antinus Nijholt, Swee Lan See

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

    48 Citations (Scopus)
    14 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    In this paper we present an experiment addressing the effect of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist. Twenty eight test participants interacted with two “female‿ robot characters: one with a high-pitched, exuberant voice, the other with a low-pitched, calm voice. Our results show that the high pitch robot was perceived significantly more attractive in terms of voice, behavior and personality. We also found that the increased level of the robot’s attractiveness induced significantly better ratings on the overall enjoyment and overall interaction quality. With our study we would like to stress the importance of the voice, in general (and the voice pitch, in particular) in the social robot design and to encourage further research in this topic within the HCI (in particular HRI – Human Robot Interaction) community.
    Original languageUndefined
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the the Second IEEE International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr 2011)
    Place of PublicationUSA
    PublisherIEEE
    Pages18-23
    Number of pages6
    ISBN (Print)978-1-4577-1655-3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 29 Nov 2011
    Eventthe Second IEEE International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr 2011), Kuala Lumpur: Proceedings of the the Second IEEE International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr 2011) - USA
    Duration: 29 Nov 2011 → …

    Publication series

    Name
    PublisherIEEE Computer Society

    Conference

    Conferencethe Second IEEE International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr 2011), Kuala Lumpur
    CityUSA
    Period29/11/11 → …

    Keywords

    • METIS-285013
    • IR-79428
    • Voice pitch
    • HMI-HF: Human Factors
    • EC Grant Agreement nr.: FP7/231868
    • EWI-21300
    • Social Robots
    • User studies

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