Should robots have accents?

Abstract

Accents are vocal features that immediately tell a listener whether a speaker comes from their same place, i.e. whether they share a social group. This in-groupness is important, as people tend to prefer interacting with others who belong to their same groups. Accents also evoke attitudinal responses based on their supposed prestigious status. These accent-based perceptions might affect interactions between humans and robots. Yet, very few studies so far have investigated the effect of accented robot speakers on users’ perceptions and behaviour, and none have collected users’ explicit preferences on robot accents. In this paper we present results from a survey of over 500 British speakers, who indicated what accent they would like a robot to have. The biggest proportion of participants wanted a robot to have a Standard Southern British English (SSBE) accent, followed by an Irish accent. Crucially, very few people wanted a robot with their same accent, or with a machine-like voice. These explicit preferences might not turn out to predict more successful interactions, also because of the unrealistic expectations that such human-like vocal features might generate in a user. Nonetheless, it seems that people have an idea of how their artificial companions should sound like, and this preference should be considered when designing them.