[iva] [Meetings] RSS 2024 Workshop on Embodied Voices (WEV)

[Paige Tuttosi]

Dear colleagues,

A reminder that the Early-bird deadline is fast approaching

We invite you to submit to our workshop: RSS 2024 Workshop on Embodied Voices (WEV)

Website: https://rosielab.github.io/wev/
Workshop: Full day, July 15th 2024
Location: Hybrid, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands and online
Manuscript submission site: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/wev2024/Submission/Index

Important Dates

   - Early-bird submission deadline: April 24th, 2024
   - Early-bird notification of acceptance: May 22nd, 2024
   - General submission deadline: May 15th, 2024
   - General notification of acceptance: June 15th, 2024
   - Camera-ready deadline: July 10th, 2024
   All deadlines are at 23:59 AOE.

Overview and Aim

Communication between humans is driven by language and voice. As such, to improve interaction between humans and robots we must improve robot voices. Research in generative voices (Glow-TTS, VITS, Matcha-TTS) has been advancing at an unprecedented rate. Yet, even though these models exist, they have seen little deployment in robotics, with roboticists often opting for out-of-the-box voices from large companies, or voices custom designed to a single robot. Appropriateness of a robot’s voice requires considering a wide range of contextual factors including their appearance, task, location, the culture and abilities of the people they interact with. At the same time, the field of HRI is concerned with designing robots to interact with humans, often by studying human behavior to replicate appropriate behaviour in robots. Yet, simply applying human-like voices to a robot can result in uncanniness and may actually reduce human comfort.

In this workshop, we aim to bring together and nourish a multidisciplinary community of those working in speech synthesis and their applications in interaction. By doing so we hope to bridge the disconnect between state-of-the-art generative models for voice and the in the wild implementation in embodied characters, whether it be robots, virtual agents or beyond. Authors will present lightning talks of 5 mins each, followed by Q&A with posters shared on our website.

Topics

We aim to bring together robot designers, interaction scholars and those working in speech and sound synthesis. We challenge those working in speech synthesis and sound generation to consider the challenges of working within the constraints of embodiment and context, and those designing robots to consider the benefits of embedding state-of-the-art generative models.

We are seeking topics including, but not limited to, the following:

Robotic Sound Design
  -Assessment and validation of appropriateness of embodied sounds
  -In the wild deployment of embodied sounds
  -Uncanny Valley voice

Contextual Sound Synthesis
  -Contextual speech synthesis
  -Contextual non-speech sounds
  -Adaptive sound generation
  -Controllable TTS

Human Studies of Vocal Adaption
  -Linguistic and psychological studies of vocal adaptation in context

Ethics in Sound Design
  -Voice vs. sound
  -Perception difficulties and accessibility
  -Reinforcement of bias (gender, accents, jobs)

Embodied Interaction
  -Robotic conversation systems
  -Acoustic processing
  -Speech processing

Submission Guidelines
We invite papers of 2-4 pages (excluding references)
Please follow the style and submission guidelines for RSS, reviews will be double-blind so all submissions must be anonymized

RSS guidelines: https://roboticsconference.org/information/authorinfo/
Overleaf template: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/robotics-science-and-systems-conference/yjqvxxpznptx

Organizers

   -Paige Tuttösí, Simon Fraser University & FEMTO-ST
  -Charlotte Stinkeste, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
  -Siyang Wang, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
  -Emma Hughson, Cambridge Consultants
  -Jūra Miniota, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
  -Minja Axelsson, University of Cambridge
  -Paul Maublanc, Aarhus University
  -Chuxuan Zhang, Simon Fraser University
  -Marine Chamoux, Aldebaran
  -Lawrence Kim, Simon Fraser University
  -Angelica Lim, Simon Fraser University

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to wev [AT] rosielab.ca

Cheers, and looking forward to seeing you in Delft!

Paige Tuttösí
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