Intonation in Robot Speech: Does it work the same as with people?

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Human-robot interaction (HRI) research aims to design natural interactions between humans and robots. Intonation, a social signaling function in human speech investigated thoroughly in linguistics, has not yet been studied in HRI. This study investigates the effect of robot speech intonation in four conditions (no intonation, focus intonation, end-of-utterance intonation, or combined intonation) on conversational naturalness, social engagement, and people’s humanlike perception of the robot collecting objective and subjective data of participant conversations (n = 120). Our results showed that humanlike intonation partially improved subjective naturalness but not observed fluency, and that intonation partially improved social engagement but did not affect humanlike perceptions of the robot. Given that our results mainly differed from our hypotheses based on human speech intonation, we discuss the implications and provide suggestions for future research to further investigate conversational naturalness in robot speech intonation.