GRASS - HRI: A Corpus of Spontaneous Austrian German Dialogues with the Social Robot Furhat

This paper presents the first corpus of spontaneous robot-directed dialogues for Austrian German. For the data collection, 20 native speakers of Austrian German (10 female, 10 male, 0 non-binary) conducted five conversations each with the social robot Furhat playing “Who am I?”, resulting in approximately 11 h of speech and 2386 utterances. Recordings are available in high audio quality from the head-mounted microphone and in addition as recorded by Furhat itself. Recordings were manually orthographically transcribed and time-aligned, maintaining the original temporal structure of the dialogues. During the experiment, five different state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems were used, resulting in differences in quality of the system responses and in user satisfaction. Also the ratings of the users experience are available together with the corpus. Our motivation for making the collected data available actually comes from our observations from our detailed analysis of Word Error Rates for the different ASR systems, described in the second part of the paper: All systems, even those fine-tuned on Austrian German, performed significantly worse than on spontaneous human-human conversational speech corpora, and none of them fulfilled the necessary real-time requirements.