An Italian Event-Based ASR-TTS System for the Nao Robot

This paper describes an event-based integration approach for building a human-robot spoken interaction system using the NAO robot platform with the URBI middleware within the ALIZ-E project. The ALIZ-E integrated system includes various components but we mainly concentrate on the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and the Text To Speech (TTS) synthesis modules while the following Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Di-alog Management (DM) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) ones will be only briefly introduced. We describe these components and how we adapted and extended them for use in the system. We discuss several options that we have considered for the implementation of the interfaces and the integration mechanism and present the event-based approach we have chosen. We describe its implementation using the URBI middleware. The system has been be used for HRI experiments with young Italian users since April 2011.