You just do not understand me! Speech Recognition in Human Robot Interaction

Abstract — Speech Recognition has not fully permeated in our interaction with devices. Therefore we advocate a speech recognition friendly artificial language (ROILA) that initially was shown to outperform English, however under constraints. ROILA is intended to be used to talk to robots and therefore in this paper we present an experimental study where the recognition of ROILA is compared to English when speech is input using a robot’s microphones and both when the robot’s head is moving and stationary. Our results show that there was no significant difference between ROILA and English but that the type of microphone and robot’s head movement had a significant effect. In conclusion we suggest implications for Human Robot (Speech) Interaction. I

Content and Context-Aware Interfaces for Smarter Media Control

Since the arrival of the computer at home during the '80s, the importance of the digital world in our daily lives has hugely increased. First centralized on a unique computer, the digital world spread over several devices that surround us: smartphones, tablets, cameras, music players, etc. However, despite the increasing number of devices around our digital lives, the way we interact with them has barely evolved. Digital devices are not aware of their surrounding environment, and they often use interfaces and mechanisms which are computer-oriented. The next step in the evolution of our digital life will be centered on a better integration of the digital world with the ecosystem of devices that surrounds it. In this work, we illustrate this upcoming evolution through the development and evaluation of original interfaces dedicated to the control of digital media. Based on our research, we organize these interfaces in three areas of improvement: unification, automation and familiarity. This thesis is divided in four main chapters. The first chapter presents the evolution of our digital world over the last 30 years. The next three chapters are centered on the three areas of improvement that we defined: unification, automation and familiarity. Unification corresponds to the fusion of digital worlds as a unique and coherent whole that devices should interact with. Automation consists in using information obtained from the user and her environment in order to simplify or automate the interaction with the digital world. Finally, familiarity allows benefiting of users' past experiences in order to create friendly and intuitive interfaces