Related papers: How does a spontaneously speaking conversational a…
Synthetic data is increasingly critical for contact centers, where privacy constraints and data scarcity limit the availability of real conversations. However, generating synthetic dialogues that are realistic and useful for downstream…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
In text-to-speech synthesis, the ability to control voice characteristics is vital for various applications. By leveraging thriving text prompt-based generation techniques, it should be possible to enhance the nuanced control of voice…
The technology of Conversational AI has made significant advancements over the last eighteen months. As a consequence, conversational agents are likely to be deployed in the near future that are designed to pursue targeted influence…
We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,172 customer support agents. Access to AI assistance increases worker productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 15\% on…
Speech-driven facial animation is the process which uses speech signals to automatically synthesize a talking character. The majority of work in this domain creates a mapping from audio features to visual features. This often requires…
Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of…
Human communication is a complex and diverse process that not only involves multiple factors such as language, commonsense, and cultural backgrounds but also requires the participation of multimodal information, such as speech. Large…
It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in…
Natural Language Generation tools, such as chatbots that can generate human-like conversational text, are becoming more common both for personal and professional use. However, there are concerns about their trustworthiness and ethical…
Developers of text-to-speech synthesizers (TTS) often make use of human raters to assess the quality of synthesized speech. We demonstrate that we can model human raters' mean opinion scores (MOS) of synthesized speech using a deep…
Research has shown that human-agent relationships form in similar ways to human-human relationships. Since children do not have the same critical analysis skills as adults (and may over-trust technology, for example), this…
Thanks to advancements in deep learning, speech generation systems now power a variety of real-world applications, such as text-to-speech for individuals with speech disorders, voice chatbots in call centers, cross-linguistic speech…
AI-synthesized speech, also known as deepfake speech, has recently raised significant concerns due to the rapid advancement of speech synthesis and speech conversion techniques. Previous works often rely on distinguishing synthesizer…
Large-scale language models, like ChatGPT, have garnered significant media attention and stunned the public with their remarkable capacity for generating coherent text from short natural language prompts. In this paper, we aim to conduct a…
Recent efforts in Spoken Dialogue Modeling aim to synthesize spoken dialogue without the need for direct transcription, thereby preserving the wealth of non-textual information inherent in speech. However, this approach faces a challenge…
Modern text-to-speech synthesis pipelines typically involve multiple processing stages, each of which is designed or learnt independently from the rest. In this work, we take on the challenging task of learning to synthesise speech from…
Social interactions and conversation skills separate the successful from the rest and the confident from the shy. For college students in particular, the ability to converse can be an outlet for the stress and anxiety experienced on a daily…
Conversational AI agents are proliferating, embodying a range of devices such as smart speakers, smart displays, robots, cars, and more. We can envision a future where a personal conversational agent could migrate across different form…
When communicating, people behave consistently across conversational roles: People understand the words they say and are able to produce the words they hear. To date, artificial agents developed for language tasks have lacked such symmetry,…