Evaluating the Utility of Auditory Perspective-Taking in Robot Speech Presentations

Abstract

In speech interactions, people routinely reason about each other's auditory perspective and adjust their manner of speaking accordingly by raising their voice to overcome noise or distance, and sometimes by pausing and resuming when conditions are more favorable for their listener. In this paper we report the findings of a listening study motivated by both this observation and a prototype auditory interface for a mobile robot that monitors the aural parameters of its environment to infer its user's listening requirements. The results provide significant empirical evidence of the utility of simulated auditory perspective taking and the inferred use of loudness and/or pauses to overcome the potential of ambient noise to mask synthetic speech.