Creating Engaging Voices for Robots

Hello SciCom's Sarah Rose Siskind Teams Up With the Honda Research Institute of Japan to Uncover the most Engaging Voice for the Tabletop Robot Haru

Sarah Rose Siskind of Hello SciCom helped create the personality of Haru, the tabletop robot developed by Honda Research Institute of Japan. From this personality bible, she headed up the talent search for the voice of the robot, auditioned dozens of actors, wrote the scripts, and directed the final performances for the voice capture process. This paper, published in  International Conference on Social Robotics, outlines the experiment determining which voice best suited Haru based on human judgements of convincingness, emotiveness, and consistency.

Original Paper Citation:

Nichols, E., Siskind, S. R., Kamino, W., Šabanović, S., & Gomez, R. (2021, November). Iterative Design of an Emotive Voice for the Tabletop Robot Haru. In International Conference on Social Robotics (pp. 362-374). Springer, Cham.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_31