Rospeex: A cloud robotics platform for human-robot spoken dialogues

To build conversational robots, roboticists are required to have deep knowledge of both robotics and spoken dialogue systems. Although they can use existing cloud services that were built for other services, e.g., voice search, it will be difficult to share robotics-specific speech corpora obtained as server logs, because they will get buried in non-robotics-related logs. Building a cloud platform especially for the robotics community will benefit not only individual robot developers but also the robotics community since we can share the log corpus collected by it. This is challenging because we need to build a wide variety of functionalities ranging from a stable cloud platform to high-quality multilingual speech recognition and synthesis engines. In this paper, we propose “rospeex,” which is a cloud robotics platform for multilingual spoken dialogues with robots. We analyze the logs we have collected by operating rospeex for more than a year. Our key contribution lies in building a cloud robotics platform and allowing the robotics community to use it without payment or authentication.