Speaking robots: The challenges of acceptance by the ageing society

The ability of robots to dialogue with humans appears as one critical Human-Machine Interaction feature when it comes to transferring robots into society. This ability gains additional importance when it comes to elderly people, since they find it more comfortable and natural to interact using voice, due to possible natural physical impairments that hinder the usage of some of the interaction modalities (e.g. touch screens). Challenges like recognition accuracy, distant speech, the idiosyncrasies of elderly voices (fading, muffled pronunciation, etc.), the effects of surrounding environment noise or the expressiveness of the robot when speaking, become highly relevant in the acceptance and usability of service robots by the ageing population. In this paper, we present the results, challenges and solutions developed during a nine-month iterative evaluation process that took place within the GrowMeUp project, with focus on speech recognition and synthesis. The paper concludes with an identification of open scientific and technological problems, based on our interpretation of results, which we identify as critical for the acceptance and usability of robots by an ageing society.