Vocal accommodation in Human-Human and Human - Robot interactions

Responsible: Omnia Ibrahim (Supervisors: Sabine Stoll and Volker Dellwo)
Duration of the project: October 2018 – November 2019

In human-human interactions, the situational context plays a large role in the degree of speakers’ accommodation. We were
interested in whether the degree of accommodation in a human-robot computer game was affected by (a) the duration
of the interaction and (b) the success of the players in the game. 30 teams of two players played two card games with a
conversational robot in which they had to find a correct order
of five cards. After game 1, the players received the result of
the game on a success scale from 1 (lowest success) to 5
(highest). Speakers’ fo accommodation was measured as the
Euclidean distance between the human speakers and each
human and the robot. Results revealed that (a) the duration of
the game had no influence on the degree of fo accommodation
and (b) the result of Game 1 correlated with the degree of fo
accommodation in Game 2 (higher success equals lower
Euclidean distance). We argue that game success is most
likely considered as a sign of the success of players’
cooperation during the discussion, which leads to a higher
accommodation behavior in speech.
 

Ibrahim, O., Skantze, G., Stoll, S., Dellwo, V. (2019) Fundamental Frequency Accommodation in Multi-Party Human-Robot Game Interactions: The Effect of Winning or Losing. Proc. Interspeech 2019, 3980-3984, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2496.

Keywords: Vocal accommodation, Voice quality, Human-robot interaction, Multi-party interactions. 

Funding source(s): URPP Language and Space

Collaborator: Gabriel Skantze (KTH in Stockholm)