{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,13]],"date-time":"2026-10-13T17:04:58Z","timestamp":1791911098159,"version":"4.3.4"},"reference-count":50,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,1,3]],"date-time":"2025-01-03T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1735862400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000780","name":"European Commission","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["871245"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["871245"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000780","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Robot. AI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>There have been significant advances in robotics, conversational AI, and spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) over the past few years, but we still do not find social robots in public spaces such as train stations, shopping malls, or hospital waiting rooms. In this paper, we argue that early-stage collaboration between robot designers and SDS researchers is crucial for creating social robots that can legitimately be used in real-world environments. We draw from our experiences running experiments with social robots, and the surrounding literature, to highlight recurring issues. Robots need better speakers, a greater number of high-quality microphones, quieter motors, and quieter fans to enable human-robot spoken interaction in the wild. If a robot was designed to meet these requirements, researchers could create SDSs that are more accessible, and able to handle multi-party conversations in populated environments. Robust robot joints are also needed to limit potential harm to older adults and other more vulnerable groups. We suggest practical steps towards future real-world deployments of conversational AI systems for human-robot interaction.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/frobt.2024.1356477","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,1,3]],"date-time":"2025-01-03T05:10:39Z","timestamp":1735881039000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["Building for speech: designing the next-generation of social robots for audio interaction"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"11","author":[{"given":"Angus","family":"Addlesee","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Ioannis","family":"Papaioannou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,1,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"25","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/2022.nlp4pi-1.3","article-title":"Securely cpeople\u2019s interactions with voice assistants at home: a bespoke tool for ethical data collection","volume-title":"Proceedings of the second workshop on NLP for positive impact (NLP4PI)","author":"Addlesee","year":"2022"},{"key":"B2","first-page":"11","article-title":"Voice assistant accessibility","volume-title":"The international workshop on spoken dialogue systems Technology, IWSDS 2023","author":"Addlesee","year":"2023"},{"key":"B3","first-page":"5","volume-title":"Understanding disrupted sentences using underspecified abstract meaning representation","author":"Addlesee","year":""},{"key":"B4","first-page":"1","article-title":"Understanding and answering incomplete questions","author":"Addlesee","year":""},{"key":"B5","first-page":"7","article-title":"Detecting agreement in multi-party dialogue: evaluating speaker diarisation versus a procedural baseline to enhance user engagement","volume-title":"Proceedings of the workshop on advancing GROup UNderstanding and robots aDaptive behaviour (GROUND)","author":"Addlesee","year":""},{"key":"B6","first-page":"13","article-title":"Multi-party goal tracking with LLMs: comparing pre-training, fine-tuning, and prompt engineering","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting of the special interest group on discourse and dialogue","author":"Addlesee","year":""},{"key":"B7","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"10","DOI":"10.21437\/interspeech.2023-307","article-title":"Data collection for multi-party task-based dialogue in social robotics","volume":"2023","author":"Addlesee","year":"","journal-title":"Int. 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