Emotive qualities in robot speech

Abstract

This paper explores the expression of emotion in synthesized speech for an anthropomorphic robot. We adapted several key emotional correlates of human speech to the robot speech synthesizer to allow the robot to speak in either an angry, calm, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad, or surprised manner. We evaluated our approach thorough an acoustic analysis of the speech patterns for each vocal affect and studied how well human subjects perceive the intended affect.