An Emotional Storyteller Robot

In this paper we present an “emotional storyteller robot”: a robot that is capable to tell story in an attractive way using the appropriate affective intonation concerning the piece of story that it’s telling. Our approach is inspired by Taghard’s theory about the human ability to find emotional analogies between the situation described in a piece of text and the past experience of the reader in his life. We use the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for the automatic construction of an “emotional conceptual space” that tries to simulate the emotional-associative capabilities of the human beings. We also apply the Shroder’s theory for the emotional vocalization of text. At the end of the paper we show the experimental results obtained testing the system on PeopleBot robot.