Disney Research has robots matching verbal styles with kids

Roboticists at Disney Research are investigating how to improve the quality of human-robot interactions by studying how speech patterns affect engagement with a creepy anthropomorphic bot that imitates its playmates' speech. It's a natural enough line of research: computer-generated speech and interaction patterns are so wooden across the board that little is expected of them. But pairs of people -- for example, kids playing with each other -- who are in tune verbally (in "prosodic synchrony") tend to be more engaged and successful in what they're doing. For the study, the team paired kids with a robot and had them play a little platforming game where one player tells the character to go and the other tells it to jump. The system they created listened to the child's voice and extracted some basic properties: loudness, word length, and frequency (i.e.