Validating Effects of Changing Inflection in Speech of a Driver Assistance Robot on Support Acceptability

Abstract

In recent years, the percentage of traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers has been increasing. Driver assistance robots, a type of driver assistance mechanism, have attracted attention as a means of solving this problem. In this paper, we investigate the effect of speech characteristics of a driver assistance robot on the degree of acceptance of advice from the robot (support acceptability). As a result, it was confirmed that lowering the pitch of particles and sentence endings increases the impression of intelligence, while raising the pitch increases the impression of anthropomorphism. In addition, a positive correlation was found between intelligence and support acceptability in subjects who were anthropomorphized toward the driver assistance robot. This suggests that the impression of intelligence may be necessary to increase support acceptability.