Designing Robot Identity: The Role of Voice, Clothing, and Task on Robot Gender Perception

TL;DR

This research investigates how voice and clothing influence human perceptions of robot gender, demonstrating that these modalities can reliably convey gender and interact to shape perceptions in various contexts.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence on how voice and clothing individually and jointly affect robot gender perception, informing design choices for socially interactive robots.

Findings

Voice and clothing reliably influence perceived robot gender.

Combining voice and clothing can alter gender perception differently.

Designing robot appearance and voice affects human-robot interaction dynamics.

Abstract

Perceptions of gender are a significant aspect of human-human interaction, and gender has wide-reaching social implications for robots deployed in contexts where they are expected to interact with humans. This work explored two flexible modalities for communicating gender in robots--voice and appearance--and we studied their individual and combined influences on a robot's perceived gender. We evaluated the perception of a robot's gender through three video-based studies. First, we conducted a study (n=65) on the gender perception of robot voices by varying speaker identity and pitch. Second, we conducted a study (n=93) on the gender perception of robot clothing designed for two different tasks. Finally, building on the results of the first two studies, we completed a large integrative video-based study (n=273) involving two human-robot interaction tasks. We found that voice and clothing can be used to reliably establish a robot's perceived gender, and that combining these two modalities can have different effects on the robot's perceived gender. Taken together, these results inform the design of robot voices and clothing as individual and interacting components in the perceptions of robot gender.