ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Socio-affective interactions between a companion robot and elderly in a Smart Home context: prosody as the main vector of the “socio-affective glue”

Yuko Sasa, Véronique Aubergé

The aim of this preliminary study of feasibility is to give a glance at interactions in a Smart Home prototype between the elderly and a companion robot that is having some socio-affective language primitives as the only vector of communication. Through a Wizard of Oz platform (EmOz), a robot is introduced as an intermediary between the technological environment and some elderly who have to give vocal commands to the robot to control the Smart Home. The robot vocal productions increases progressively by adding prosodic levels: (1) no speech, (2) pure prosodic mouth noises supposed to be the “glue’s” tools, (3) lexicons with supposed “glue” prosody and (4) subject’s commands imitations with supposed “glue” prosody. The elderly subjects’ speech behaviors confirm the hypothesis that the socio-affective “glue” effect increase towards the prosodic levels, especially for socio-isolated people.