Robotic speech synthesis: Perspectives on interactions, scenarios, and ethics

In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic voices to meet the needs of different situations? In this paper, we discuss this issue from three perspectives: 1) the difficulties of synthesizing non-verbal and interaction-oriented speech signals, particularly backchannels; 2) the scenario classification for robotic voice synthesis; 3) the ethical issues regarding the design of robot voice for its emotion and identity. We present the findings of relevant literature and our prior work, trying to bring the attention of human-robot interaction researchers to design better conversational robots in the future.