In 2014, The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collaborated with the School of Drama to create a performance of “Sure Thing” at the Purnell Center for the Arts in Pittsburgh. The role of Betty was played by actress Olivia Brown, while the role of Bill was played by a robot. The Robotics Institute chose “Sure Thing” for this experiment because “the comedic narrative structure involves a time-rewinding device which can be interpreted as a depth-first search through a dialogue.” Because the play requires minimal movement and a lot of dialogue, they emphasized “conversational gesturing in combination with prosodic speech synthesis” in the development of the robot. To generate nuanced speech with expressive delivery and comedic timing, they captured “a set of prosodic utterance structures from a human actor to drive a custom synthesizer based on the open-source Festival system,” which they described as the speech equivalent of motion capture.
To view a video of the performance, please see the “Related Links” section.
