Accents are vocal features that immediately tella listener whether a speaker comes from their same place,i.e. whether they share a social group. This in-groupness isimportant, as people tend to prefer interacting with others whobelong to their same groups. Accents also evoke attitudinalresponses based on their supposed prestigious status. Theseaccent-based perceptions might affect interactions between humansand robots. Yet, very few studies so far have investigatedthe effect of accented robot speakers on users’ perceptions andbehaviour, and none have collected users’ explicit preferenceson robot accents. In this paper we present results from asurvey of over 500 British speakers, who indicated what accentthey would like a robot to have. The biggest proportion ofparticipants wanted a robot to have a Standard SouthernBritish English (SSBE) accent, followed by an Irish accent.Crucially, very few people wanted a robot with their sameaccent, or with a machine-like voice. These explicit preferencesmight not turn out to predict more successful interactions, alsobecause of the unrealistic expectations that such human-likevocal features might generate in a user. Nonetheless, it seemsthat people have an idea of how their artificial companionsshould sound like, and this preference should be consideredwhen designing them. ; QC 20210205


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    Title :

    Should robots have accents?


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2020-01-01



    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629



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