Toshiyuki Koga

Design targeting voice interface robot capable of active listening

The EU, South Korea and Japan have a pressing need to compensate for growing labor shortages in their aging societies. There is growing awareness that robotic technology has the potential to ameliorate this problem in terms of both physical and mental labor. To take an example of mental labor, a human therapist dealing with elderly people must be an active listener. In order to realize a robot capable of active listening, we adopt Iveys basic listening sequence skills in microcounseling. In this paper, we describe a voice interface robot that realizes simple feedback, repeat feedback and questions for Iveys basic listening sequence. We conducted an experiment, whose results show that 69% of incidences of feedback have adequate reflective words for spoken sentences and 56% of questions are adequate for these reflective words.

ApriAlpha V3 - sharp ear robot - and the omni-directional auditory process

Home robots will help us household works in the living environment. The robots need to listen to users order and communicate with him/her. For the interaction between the user and the robot, we developed the omni-directional auditory process. This process allows the robot recognize the direction of the sound source of users voice - that is the direction of user. It extracts the sound stream of users speech, and recognizes the contents of the speech. We implemented this process into ApriAlphatrade V3 - sharp ear robot, and exhibited in Aichi Expo 2005. This paper describes the summary of ApriAlphatrade V3 and the omni-directional auditory process - the estimation of the voice direction with the function and the experimentation of the process