Designing Robot Identity: The Role of Voice, Clothing, and Task on Robot Gender Perception

Abstract Perceptions of gender have a significant impact on human-human interaction, and gender has wide-reaching social implications for robots intended to interact with humans. This work explored two flexible modalities for communicating gender in robots–voice and appearance–and we studied their individual and combined influences on a robot’s perceived gender. We evaluated the perception of a robot’s gender through three online studies. First, we conducted a voice design study (n = 65) on the gender perception of robot voices by varying speaker identity and pitch. Second, we conducted a clothing design study (n = 93) on the gender perception of robot clothing designed for two different tasks. Finally, building on the results of the first two studies, we completed a large integrative video study (n = 273) involving two human-robot interaction tasks. We found that voice and clothing can be used to reliably establish a robot’s perceived gender, and that combining these two modalities can have different effects on the robot’s perceived gender. Taken together, these results inform the design of robot voices and clothing as individual and interacting components in the perceptions of robot gender.