Disney Research Pittsburgh

We present the design and control of an untethered, energetically autonomous single-legged hopping robot.

This technology can enable others to create novel multi-party interactions for entertainment where a limited number of keywords has to be recognized.

This paper examines the extent to which computer speech recognition errors for children’s speech can be attributed to common phonological effects associated with language acquisition.

Our results indicate that the considered acoustic features are related to engagement levels for both the child-child and child-robot interaction.

The two case studies presented here might, at first glance, seem to represent very different points in that design space, but they are highly related with respect to the turn-taking problems and challenges they expose.

In this paper, using different formant-related measurements as exemplary analysis features generated within articulatory-phonetic guidelines, we demonstrate the nonlinear relationships of children’s physical parameters to their voice.

This paper highlights the issues with keyword spotting using a simple two-word game played by children of different age groups and gives quantitative performance assessments using a novel keyword spotting technique that is especially suited to such scenarios.

We describe phone recognition experiments on hand labelled data for children aged between 5 and 9.

We report results for an online multi-keyword spotter in a game that contains overlapping speech, off-task side talk, and keyword forms that vary in completeness and duration.

We have developed a toy sized humanoid robot with soft air-filled modules on its links which sense contact and protect the robot and any interacting humans from damaging collisions.