I Know You're Listening: Adaptive Voice for HRI

When interactions are designed for the average, they don't fit anywhere. When humans are placed in a scenario, they consider and adapt to their environment, their interlocutor, their task, and what message they need to convey, they don't react in averages. Doing this allows them to communicate more efficiently, but also creates a sense of unity in the interaction. When interacting we want to feel seen and heard, and this should be the same for human-robot interactions. Here we present past and current work that aims to improve human-robot interactions through adaptive speech and sounds. We explore adapting to environments, users, and tasks to improve communication between humans and robots.