The present invention relates to robot control apparatuses which make a user recognize that speech is accepted. A user's speech input to a microphone 15 is subjected to speech recognition by a speech recognizer 50A. Based on the speech recognition result, an action determining unit 52 determines subsequent actions to be taken by a robot. At the same time, an echo back unit 56 analyzes prosodic information of the user's speech input to the microphone 15 and, based on the prosodic information, generates echo back speech which is prosody-controlled speech. The echo back speech is supplied to a loudspeaker 18 through an output controller 57 and is output from the loudspeaker 18.