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Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice

With fast and reliable international transportation, more people with different language backgrounds can interact now. As a result, the need for communicative agents fluent in several languages to assist those people is highlighted. The high cost of hiring human attendants fluent in several language...

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Autores principales: Pourfannan, Hamed, Mahzoon, Hamed, Yoshikawa, Yuichihiro, Ishiguro, Hiroshi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9797082/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36576933
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278852
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author Pourfannan, Hamed
Mahzoon, Hamed
Yoshikawa, Yuichihiro
Ishiguro, Hiroshi
author_facet Pourfannan, Hamed
Mahzoon, Hamed
Yoshikawa, Yuichihiro
Ishiguro, Hiroshi
author_sort Pourfannan, Hamed
collection PubMed
description With fast and reliable international transportation, more people with different language backgrounds can interact now. As a result, the need for communicative agents fluent in several languages to assist those people is highlighted. The high cost of hiring human attendants fluent in several languages makes using social robots a more affordable alternative in international gatherings. A social robot capable of presenting a piece of information in more than one language at the same time to its audience is the goal of this line of study. However, the negative effect of background noise on speech comprehension in humans is well-established. Hence, presenting a piece of information in two different languages at the same time by the robot creates an adverse listening condition for both individuals listening to the speech of such a bilingual robot. In this study, we investigated whether manipulating the pitch and gender of the robot’s voice could affect human subjects’ memory of the presented information in the presence of background noise. The results indicate that the pitch and gender of the speaking voice do indeed affect our memory of the presented information. when a male voice was used, a higher pitch resulted in significantly better memory performance than a lower pitch. Contrarily, when a female voice was used, a lower pitch resulted in significantly better memory in participants than a higher pitch. Both male and female subjects performed significantly better with a female voice in a noisy background. In nutshell, the result of this study suggests using a female voice for robots in noisy conditions, as in the case of simultaneously speaking robots, can significantly improve the retrieval of presented information in human subjects.
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spelling pubmed-97970822022-12-29 Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice Pourfannan, Hamed Mahzoon, Hamed Yoshikawa, Yuichihiro Ishiguro, Hiroshi PLoS One Research Article With fast and reliable international transportation, more people with different language backgrounds can interact now. As a result, the need for communicative agents fluent in several languages to assist those people is highlighted. The high cost of hiring human attendants fluent in several languages makes using social robots a more affordable alternative in international gatherings. A social robot capable of presenting a piece of information in more than one language at the same time to its audience is the goal of this line of study. However, the negative effect of background noise on speech comprehension in humans is well-established. Hence, presenting a piece of information in two different languages at the same time by the robot creates an adverse listening condition for both individuals listening to the speech of such a bilingual robot. In this study, we investigated whether manipulating the pitch and gender of the robot’s voice could affect human subjects’ memory of the presented information in the presence of background noise. The results indicate that the pitch and gender of the speaking voice do indeed affect our memory of the presented information. when a male voice was used, a higher pitch resulted in significantly better memory performance than a lower pitch. Contrarily, when a female voice was used, a lower pitch resulted in significantly better memory in participants than a higher pitch. Both male and female subjects performed significantly better with a female voice in a noisy background. In nutshell, the result of this study suggests using a female voice for robots in noisy conditions, as in the case of simultaneously speaking robots, can significantly improve the retrieval of presented information in human subjects. Public Library of Science 2022-12-28 /pmc/articles/PMC9797082/ /pubmed/36576933 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278852 Text en © 2022 Pourfannan et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Pourfannan, Hamed
Mahzoon, Hamed
Yoshikawa, Yuichihiro
Ishiguro, Hiroshi
Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
title Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
title_full Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
title_fullStr Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
title_full_unstemmed Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
title_short Towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: Primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
title_sort towards a simultaneously speaking bilingual robot: primary study on the effect of gender and pitch of the robot’s voice
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9797082/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36576933
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278852
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