Nordic Speech Research Forum: Professor Kerstin Fischer, University of Southern Denmark

In this talk, I address three different perspectives on speaking robots; First, I present some of our studies in which we used human-robot interactions to study behavioural and interactional effects of charismatic speech characteristics; these studies support phonetic and prosodic research on charismatic speaking styles. Next, I present some examples of how we used charismatic human-robot interaction to study language attitudes and intercultural differences. Finally, I present a study in which we investigated what a robot's voice makes people expect about a robot’s embodiment, specifically about its size. Together, these studies show that robots can be useful methodological tools for carrying out research on speech.

Kerstin Fischer is professor for Language and Technology Interaction at the University of Southern Denmark and director of the Human-Robot Interaction Lab in Sonderborg. Kerstin is senior associate editor of the journal ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction and associate editor of the book series ‘Studies in Pragmatics’ (Brill). She has published 9 books, 45 journal articles and more than 100 conference papers, in which she brings her background in linguistics, communication and multimodal interaction analysis to the study of behavior change, persuasive technology and human-robot interaction.