A Preliminary Study on Realizing Human–Robot Mental Comforting Dialogue via Sharing Experience Emotionally

Mental health issues are receiving more and more attention in society. In this paper, we introduce a preliminary study on human–robot mental comforting conversation, to make an android robot (ERICA) present an understanding of the user’s situation by sharing similar emotional experiences to enhance the perception of empathy. Specifically, we create the emotional speech for ERICA by using CycleGAN-based emotional voice conversion model, in which the pitch and spectrogram of the speech are converted according to the user’s mental state. Then, we design dialogue scenarios for the user to talk about his/her predicament with ERICA. In the dialogue, ERICA shares other people’s similar predicaments and adopts a low-spirit voice to express empathy to the interlocutor’s situation. At the end of the dialogue, ERICA tries to encourage with a positive voice. Subsequently, questionnaire-based evaluation experiments were conducted with the recorded conversation. In the questionnaire, we use the Big Five scale to evaluate ERICA’s personality. In addition, the perception of emotion, empathy, and encouragement in the dialogue are evaluated. The results show that the proposed emotional expression strategy helps the android robot better present low-spirit emotion, empathy, the personality of extroversion, while making the user better feel the encouragement.