A talking robot and its human-like expressive speech production

A talking robot which adaptively learns the vocalization skill by an auditory feedback learning is being developed. The talking robot is constructed by the mechanical vocal systems, which respectively correspond to human organs. In vocalization, the vibration of vocal cords generates a source sound, and then the sound wave is led to a vocal tract, which works as a resonance filter to determine the spectrum envelope. The talking robot autonomously learns the vocalization by applying auditory feedback. In this study, a human-like expressive speech production by the talking robot is introduced. A human generates speech by controlling their own vocal organs for changing the speech expressions such as the volume and the intonations. To realize the human-like expressive speech production, a control method for the mechanical organs has to be established. In the first part of the paper, the construction of the talking robot and the acquisition of the vocalization will be described, and then the control method for producing human-like speech with various expressions will be introduced.