Artificial Voices of Sex Robots and Love Dolls

In love and sex, the voice is a decisive factor. It not only matters what is said, but also how it is said. Pitch, volume and personal expression are important to attract and retain potential partners. The same goes for sex robots and love dolls, and is true for chatbots and virtual assistants with sexual orientation as well. If you are not working with ordinary recordings, they all need artificial voices (if you decide to use voices at all). The synthetization of voices, or speech synthesis, has been an object of interest for centuries. Today, it is mostly realized with a text-to-speech system (TTS), an automaton that interprets and reads aloud. This system refers to text which is available for instance in a knowledge base or on a website. Different procedures have been established to adjust the artificial voice. A recently published article by Oliver Bendel examines how the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) can be used for sex robots and love servants. Existing tags, attributes and values are categorized in the present context and new ones are proposed to support the purpose of the special machines. In addition, a short ethical discussion takes place. The article „SSML for Sex Robots“ is part of the new Springer book „Love and Sex with Robots“ …

Fig.: The artificial voices of love dolls and sex robots must be specially designed

Intimate Relationships with Robots

In a few days the book „Love and Sex with Robots“, edited by David Levy and Adrian D. Cheok, will be published. From the information on the Springer website: „This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots, LSR 2017, held in December 2017, in London, UK. The 12 revised papers presented together with 2 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 83 submissions. One of the biggest challenges of the Love and Sex with Robots conference is to engage a wider scientific community in the discussions of the multifaceted topic, which has only recently established itself as an academic research topic within, but not limited to, the disciplines of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, robotics, biomedical science and robot ethics etc.“ Included are contributions by Oliver Bendel („SSML for Sex Robots“), Sophie Wennerscheid („Posthuman desire in robotics and science fiction“) and Dr. Rebekah Rousi („Lying cheating robots – robots and infidelity“). The book can be pre-ordered via www.springer.com/de/book/9783319763682. Already on the market is the book with the same title, which contains the contributions of the LSR 2016 at Goldsmiths.

Fig.: The cover of the new book (photo: Springer)