In the last part of the experiment, our activities have focused on the testing and validation of the prototypes implemented and on dissemination activities.

UNIRM1 has developed an innovative Web-based corpus collection infrastructure, in order to attract a very large community. This initiative has been announced to the RoboCup@Home community, and the output of this collection will be an extensive corpus for human-robot interaction within home environments, that will be published for the whole robotic community and for RoboCup competitions.

A second major activity of this month has been a set of usability study conducted within a real home environment, to evaluate the whole speech system with twelve English native tongue speakers. The results of the experiment are currently being analysed.

In addition UNIRM1 and MV have cooperated to the evaluation of the wizard developed by MV with the second scheduled demonstrator: surveillance.

Finally, demonstrations of the Speaky 4 Robots experiment have been presented at “Robots on Tour” (Zurich, March 9^th) and at “RomeCup 2013” (March 23^rd, Rome) by UNIRM1. UNIRM1 and MV are both committed in disseminating the outcomes of the Speaky for Robots project in the next months.

February has been completely dedicated to the evaluation of our system with external non-expert users (Task 4.3), and to additional testing of the wizard component (Task 4.2).

UNIRM1 has worked on the design of an experimental evaluation with non-expert participants. Based on the experience acquired through the first exploratory evaluation.The whole process has been split into a new lexical corpus collection, this time based on a web-based architecture to guarantee access to a large audience, and the setup of a usability study involving 12 people that will take place in April.

MV has successfully evaluated the new wizard component through internal validation and testing.

UNIRM1 will present Speaky for Robots at “Robots on Tour”, on March 9th 2013, and at RomeCup, on March 22nd 2013.

In the last bimester, we have been working on the experimental evaluation of the prototypes (Task 4).  On the one hand, we have defined and tested the procedure for performance evaluation of the vocal interfaces defined for different robots and environments. On the other hand, laboratory experiments have been performed to improve the prototypes.

MV has finalized the development of the wizard prototype (Task 3.2) and the corresponding technical report.

S4R has been presented at Robots @ DIAG November 26^th, at DIS (Roma) within the events organized for the EU Robotics Week 2013.

In the last bimester, we have focussed our work on with the refinement and testing of the Service Prototype and Demonstrator, (Deliverable 3.1) which is part of the Task 3: System Development, Implementation, Integration and Testing. Specifically, we have completed the interface to the MS dictation engine, in preparation to a refinement of the ASR process, that relies on both a recognition based on a language model specified using an application dependent grammar and a generic language model. We have adopted and specialized the dialog infrastructure offered by the Speaky Mediavoice development environment and we have thus delivered a new version of the prototype system. We have run some tests on the VUI, and we have collected the results obtained by processing a small corpus of spoken sentences. The analysis of these results has been used in order to define possible improvements of the prototype.

S4R has been presented at the ECHORD Workshop in connection with IEEE IROS 2012, Vilamoura, Portugal, October 11^th, 2012.

In the last bimester we have worked on with the activities of Task 3: System Development, Implementation, Integration and Testing, namely on the implementation and testing of the first prototype of the VUI for the chosen domains. This effort will be reported in Deliverable 3.1, Mid-term Home Service Prototype and Demonstrator, Mid-term Home Service Prototype and Demonstrator. More specifically, we have built a debugging interface for the speech interpretation process. Moreover, we have implemented in ROS the modules for the integration of the knowledge about the environment, represented as a semantic map, and for “grounding” of the commands of the robot in a real application scenario. Finally, we completed the preliminary work on Task 4: Experimental Evaluation; on the definition of experimental set-up and performance metrics, by acquiring the semantic map of a real home, that will be used to display the execution of the commands given to the robot using the Player/Stage simulator. The poster describing the current state of the project has been successfully presented at AAAI-12 Media Fair (Toronto, Canada, July 23-27).