Feel my Speech: Automatic Speech Emotion Conversion for Tangible, Haptic, or Proxemic Interaction Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method and starter kit for converting speech emotions into physical sensations, enabling new tangible and social interaction designs with applications like robots and animals.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to speech emotion conversion that facilitates physical and social interaction design, bridging the gap between abstract emotion labels and tangible experiences.

Findings

Proposes a method for speech emotion conversion.

Provides a starter kit for implementing the conversion.

Explores applications in robot and animal interactions.

Abstract

Innovations in interaction design are increasingly driven by progress in machine learning fields. Automatic speech emotion recognition (SER) is such an example field on the rise, creating well performing models, which typically take as input a speech audio sample and provide as output digital labels or values describing the human emotion(s) embedded in the speech audio sample. Such labels and values are only abstract representations of the felt or expressed emotions, making it challenging to analyse them as experiences and work with them as design material for physical interactions, including tangible, haptic, or proxemic interactions. This paper argues that both the analysis of emotions and their use in interaction designs would benefit from alternative physical representations, which can be directly felt and socially communicated as bodily sensations or spatial behaviours. To this end, a method is described and a starter kit for speech emotion conversion is provided. Furthermore, opportunities of speech emotion conversion for new interaction designs are introduced, such as for interacting with animals or robots.