Expressive speech recognition and synthesis as enabling technologies for affective robot-child communication

Abstract

This paper presents our recent and current work on expressive speech synthesis and recognition as enabling technologies for affective robot-child interaction. We show that current expression recognition systems could be used to discriminate between several archetypical emotions, but also that the old adage "there's no data like more data" is more than ever valid in this field. A new speech synthesizer was developed that is capable of high quality concatenative synthesis. This system will be used in the robot to synthesize expressive nonsense speech by using prosody transplantation and a recorded database with expressive speech examples. With these enabling components lining up, we are getting ready to start experiments towards hopefully effective child-machine communication of affect and emotion. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.