Social Robotics meets Sociolinguistics: Investigating Accent Bias and Social Context in HRI

Deploying a social robot in the real world means that it must interact with speakers from diverse backgrounds, who in turn are likely to show substantial accent and dialect variation. Linguistic variation in social context has been well studied in human-human interaction; however, the influence of these factors on human interactions with digital agents, especially embodied agents such as robots, has received less attention. Here we present an ongoing project where the goal is to develop a social robot that is suitable for deployment in ethnically-diverse areas with distinctive regional accents. To help in developing this robot, we carried out an online survey of Scottish adults to understand their expectations for conversational interaction with a robot. The results confirm that social factors constraining accent and dialect are likely to be significant issues for human-robot interaction in this context, and so must be taken into account in the design of the system at all levels.