Harlie the Chatbot

'HARLIE' stands for Human and Robot Language Interaction Experiment.
Harlie is a robot that calls you on your smartphone to chat about various topics and asks you to complete simple voice tasks (e.g. "Say /AH/ as in 'car' for five seconds."). Phone chats with Harlie typically take around a minute or so and Harlie will call you on average twice a week over a period of 6-12 weeks.
Through their occasional phone chats with Harlie over several weeks, users will contribute to a research study on human-computer interaction and speech-language functioning, which will run from January until May 2016 for an initial trial of the application.
The study is conducted by a research team of at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industry Research Organisation (CSIRO) and The University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. The multi-disciplinary team comprises Speech Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, Engineers, and IT Developers.
All procedures of the Harlie project have been granted ethical clearance via the Medical Research Ethics Committee of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in November 2015.
The main purpose of the Harlie application is to remotely and conveniently collect voice and speech samples over several weeks in the context of a friendly phone chat between Harlie and users of the application. Future iterations of applications like Harlie might assist in remotely assessing patients with Speech-Language impairments.
Before downloading and using the Harlie application, please read the information provided on the Research Participant Information Sheet (
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/cis/harlie/info
), the online Consent Form (
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/cis/harlie/consent
) and the Harlie manual (
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/cis/harlie/manual
).
After your have completed the consent form and installed Harlie, you are asked to register your gender and year of birth. Harlie will then randomly call you for a chat about a variety of topics including your favourite movies and music. We are hoping you can spend about a minute week for 12 weeks talking to Harlie. You can opt out at anytime and support is available via email to
support@harlie.org.au
.
A Wi-Fi Internet connection is required to chat with Harlie.
Thank you for considering your participation in our Harlie research project.