Related papers: How does a spontaneously speaking conversational a…
One of the long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to build an agent that can communicate intelligently with human in natural language. Most existing work on natural language learning relies heavily on training over a pre-collected…
In this paper, we present a methodology for the development of embodied conversational agents for social virtual worlds. The agents provide multimodal communication with their users in which speech interaction is included. Our proposal…
Customizing voice and speaking style in a speech synthesis system with intuitive and fine-grained controls is challenging, given that little data with appropriate labels is available. Furthermore, editing an existing human's voice also…
Recent advances in voice synthesis, coupled with the ease with which speech can be harvested for millions of people, introduce new threats to applications that are enabled by devices such as voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home…
We present a comprehensive empirical study for personalized spontaneous speech synthesis on the basis of linguistic knowledge. With the advent of voice cloning for reading-style speech synthesis, a new voice cloning paradigm for human-like…
When engaging in conversations, dialogue agents in a virtual simulation environment may exhibit their own emotional states that are unrelated to the immediate conversational context, a phenomenon known as self-emotion. This study explores…
Synthetic users are cost-effective proxies for real users in the evaluation of conversational recommender systems. Large language models show promise in simulating human-like behavior, raising the question of their ability to represent a…
The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be…
Synthesized speech is common today due to the prevalence of virtual assistants, easy-to-use tools for generating and modifying speech signals, and remote work practices. Synthesized speech can also be used for nefarious purposes, including…
The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) raise the possibility that synthetic agents can serve as substitutes for real participants in human-subject research. To evaluate this claim, prior research has largely focused on…
We present an end-to-end voice-based conversational agent that is able to engage in naturalistic multi-turn dialogue and align with the interlocutor's conversational style. The system uses a series of deep neural network components for…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and…
Humans often speak in a continuous manner which leads to coherent and consistent prosody properties across neighboring utterances. However, most state-of-the-art speech synthesis systems only consider the information within each sentence…
Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen…
In an era of human-computer interaction with increasingly agentic AI systems capable of connecting with users conversationally, speech is an important modality for commanding agents. By recognizing and using speech emotions (i.e., how a…
Communication between humans and artificial agents is essential for their interaction. This is often inspired by human communication, which uses gestures, facial expressions, gaze direction, and other explicit and implicit means. This work…
Personalised response generation enables generating human-like responses by means of assigning the generator a social identity. However, pragmatics theory suggests that human beings adjust the way of speaking based on not only who they are…
Towards human-like dialogue systems, current emotional dialogue approaches jointly model emotion and semantics with a unified neural network. This strategy tends to generate safe responses due to the mutual restriction between emotion and…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…