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Speech recording**

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“I am recording spoken information from you.”

lupe

Interaction Situation

The user has provided some speech input. The robot needs to indicate that it is perceiving and processing the input.
gluehbirne

Solution

Let the robot express that:

To provide feedback that the user input is recorded, you should visualize the act of listening. To do so, you can highlight the recording „sensory“ organ (microphone or ears as long as the user is talking. Depending on the robot this can be achieved in different ways:

  • If the robot has movable ears, the auricles are turned towards the user.
  • If the robot has ears that are augmented with light, they are highlighted through a light signal. The light takes a bright, blue or green color and pulsates in a slow rhythm.
  • Your robot doesn’t have ears? Find some other creative way to visualize the recording of what the user is saying.

Related patterns:

Needed by: Listening 

Works well together with: Attentive
deko_element

Examples

deko_element

Rationale

In social human interaction, facing and looking at the opposite person is often interpreted as taking in what the person is saying. However, this behavior is, in fact, rather ambiguous, as we can never be quite sure whether someone is actually listening or, for example, day dreaming. Animals communicate make the activity of listening more explicit, by putting their ears upright and/or turning them towards a (potential) auditory cue in the environment. This behavior can be copied by robots with movable ears. Analogies can also be found using other communication modalities. Technical devices often use light signals or animations to visualize speech recording (compare Amazon Echo, mobile phone audio recording apps, cameras). This design approach can also be transferred to robots. For example, Softbank robotics designed their Pepper robot with ears that can be illuminated by light. Light research suggests to use cold colors such as blue to make the light signal more attention grabbing. Alternatively, a green light color could be used to emphasize that the speech recording functionality is active. Green color is generally associated with a technical device being turned on or working.

 

References and further readings:

  • Fronemann, N., Pollmann, K., and Loh, W.-H. (2021). Should my robot know what’s best for me? – Human-Robot Interaction between User Experience and Ethical Design. AI & Society. Special Issue: Critical Robotics.
  • Baraka, K., & Veloso, M. M. (2018). Mobile service robot state revealing through expressive lights: Formalism, design, and evaluation. International Journal of Social Robotics, 10(1), 65–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0431-x
  • Choi, Y., Kim, J., Pan, P., & Jeung, J. (2007, September). The considerable elements of the emotion expression using lights in apparel types. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology (pp. 662–666). https://doi.org/10.1145/1378063.1378175