Expanding the Capabilities of Robot NAO to Enable Human-Like Communication with Children with Speech and Language Disorders

摘要

The humanoid robot NAO is widely used in therapy scenarios for children with neurodevelopmental disorders, however it has poor speech recognition and dialog based on a predefined lexicon that results in limited vocabulary and limited number of predefined dialog scenarios. The integration of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) in NAO can significantly enhance and expand the robot's capabilities for intensive speech and listening exercises for children with speech and language disorders. Applying design-based research, the authors present the ongoing effective iteration in the building-testing cycles of a software architecture for Conversational AI in the robot NAO by integrating different AI cloud services for NLP into NAO's native software. Examining the aims and methods of stakeholders interested in integrating Conversational AI in NAO for speech and language therapy, we revealed several technical and ethical challenges. These challenges were successfully addressed with solutions implemented in the Node-RED platform, such as achieving more accurate and speech recognition, generating human-like text based on a context, and implementing multilingual text-to-speech synthesis. Additionally, implementation raises ethical considerations for both developers and therapists, especially regarding the assessment of risks linked with AI systems. We followed the guidelines set in the European AI Act, which categorizes AI systems according to their associated risk levels.