Accompaniment robot with Turkish speech synthesis and LIP synchronization

Abstract

With the introduction of robots to the domestic environments, robot - human relations have become a more important research area. That is why we decided to make a robot to accompany people in their homes. We were dealing with four different problems to accomplish this: creation of various robot heads, providing the robot the ability to produce speech sound, the ability to move lip positions in accordance with speech when the robot is talking and establishing a relationship between the words in the sentences which are spoken to the robots. The first of these problems was solved by the construction of three different robot heads. To solve the second problem, the Formant Speech Synthesis method was used. In the solution of the third problem, special lip positions were defined for each group of letters and during the speech these lip movements were made by robots respectively. In the last problem, root finding, annotation and relation finding tools were developed for Turkish. By the extraction of information from what was said by the robot by finding the suitability of the phrases. The mentioned statements were inserted into the patterns and the robot was able to extract information from these patterns. In the end, people and the robot were able to play together and the system was evaluated for how well it worked.