Effects on Support Acceptability by Japanese Speech Characteristics of Driver Assistance Robot.

In recent years, the percentage of accidents caused by elderly drivers has been increasing. Driver assistance robots, a type of driver assistance mechanism, have attracted attention as a means of solving this problem. In this paper, experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of the speech characteristics of a driver assistance robot on the support acceptability. The results showed that lowering the pitch of particles and sentence endings increased the impression of intelligence, while raising the pitch increased the impression of anthropomorphism. In addition, when anthropomorphism occurred, a positive correlation was found between intelligence and support acceptability. This suggests that adding the impression of intelligence may be necessary to increase the support acceptability.