Nordic Grant: Giving Voice to Inclusion – How Robots Can Listen to Include":

Researcher’s Chronicle | Isabel Neto is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and a researcher at LASIGE. Her research focuses on exploring how robots can promote inclusion among people. She was awarded the Bolsa Nordic 2024 to develop the project “Real-Time Inclusion Metrics based on Conversations” during a research visit to the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden between February and March 2025. In this article, she shares her experience.

I would like to thank the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and SPOT Nordic for this unique opportunity and financial support, and also KTH Royal Institute of Technology for their hospitality and collaboration.

How Can We Design Robots to Promote Inclusion in Groups? Can the Way We Speak Help?

As social robots are increasingly integrated into environments such as homes, care facilities, and schools, we are more frequently exposed to interactions with these technologies—both individually and in group settings.

Therefore, robots should not only be functional; they should also foster interaction and inclusion among people. To achieve this goal, it’s essential to understand if and how the way we speak—including tone of voice, energy, and cadence—can help a robot interpret whether we feel included, whether we can express our opinions, and whether all group members are being heard.

During this visit, I joined a group of researchers at KTH (Sweden) to explore the relationship between speech patterns and group inclusion. As part of our collaboration, we applied machine learning algorithms to analyze group conversations, investigating if and how audio-based metrics can assess social dynamics and indicate participants' level of inclusion. Additionally, we designed new studies involving conversations between robots and humans to validate and enhance our findings.

Main Goal: Understanding How Speech Can Guide Robots to Reduce Bias and Encourage More Inclusive Interactions

Visit to Stockholm under the Nordic Grant

 Thanks to the Nordic Grant, I began my visit in February 2025. The visit had several main objectives:

• Exploring how speech characteristics can inform AI models to predict levels of participation and engagement within group members.

• Designing new studies in the field of social robotics to foster inclusion among groups of different ages.

• Disseminating the research results.

• Building a network of contacts with researchers from Swedish universities for future collaborations.

The collaboration took place within the “Robotic Perception Learning” and “Speech, Music and Hearing” groups. It was a unique opportunity to work with Prof. Iolanda Leite, Dr. André Pereira, Dr. Sarah Gillet, and their dedicated research teams. I also had the chance to visit and connect with several researchers and professors at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Uppsala University. I am very grateful to FCT, SPOT Nordic, and KTH for this opportunity, and I hope other Portuguese researchers will also take advantage of this incredible program.

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