Related papers: How does a spontaneously speaking conversational a…
In order to create effective storytelling agents three fundamental questions must be answered: first, is a physically embodied agent preferable to a virtual agent or a voice-only narration? Second, does a human voice have an advantage over…
The identity of a speaker influences language comprehension through modulating perception and expectation. This review explores speaker effects and proposes an integrative model of language and speaker processing that integrates distinct…
Intelligent agents have great potential as facilitators of group conversation among older adults. However, little is known about how to design agents for this purpose and user group, especially in terms of agent embodiment. To this end, we…
Human conversation involves language, speech, and visual cues, with each medium providing complementary information. For instance, speech conveys a vibe or tone not fully captured by text alone. While multimodal LLMs focus on generating…
In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic…
Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…
In spoken dialogue systems, we aim to deploy artificial intelligence to build automated dialogue agents that can converse with humans. Dialogue systems are increasingly being designed to move beyond just imitating conversation and also…
Personalizing dialogue agents is important for dialogue systems to generate more specific, consistent, and engaging responses. However, most current dialogue personalization approaches rely on explicit persona descriptions during inference,…
As people increasingly seek emotional support and companionship from AI chatbots, understanding how such interactions impact mental well-being becomes critical. We conducted a four-week randomized controlled experiment (n=981, >300k…
AI-mediated communication is designed to help us do our work more quickly and efficiently. But does it come at a cost? This study uses smart replies (SRs) to show how AI influences humans without any intent on the part of the developer -…
Spontaneous style speech synthesis, which aims to generate human-like speech, often encounters challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality data and limitations in model capabilities. Recent language model-based TTS systems can be trained…
As part of a perennial project, our team is actively engaged in developing new synthetic assistant (SA) technologies to assist in training combat medics and medical first responders. It is critical that medical first responders are well…
Speech synthesis might hold the key to low-resource speech recognition. Data augmentation techniques have become an essential part of modern speech recognition training. Yet, they are simple, naive, and rarely reflect real-world conditions.…
The use of synthetic speech as data augmentation is gaining increasing popularity in fields such as automatic speech recognition and speech classification tasks. Despite novel text-to-speech systems with voice cloning capabilities, that…
As the phonetic and acoustic manifestations of laughter in conversation are highly diverse, laughter synthesis should be capable of accommodating such diversity while maintaining high controllability. This paper proposes a generative model…
Prior research indicates that users prefer assistive technologies whose personalities align with their own. This has sparked interest in automatic personality perception (APP), which aims to predict an individual's perceived personality…
Voice assistants are increasingly prevalent, from personal devices to team environments. This study explores how voice type and contribution quality influence human-agent team performance and perceptions of anthropomorphism, animacy,…
Due to the increasing demand in films and games, synthesizing 3D avatar animation has attracted much attention recently. In this work, we present a production-ready text/speech-driven full-body animation synthesis system. Given the text and…
With the advancements in AI speech synthesis, it is easier than ever before to generate realistic audio in a target voice. One only needs a few seconds of reference audio from the target, quite literally putting words in the target person's…
Community engagement processes in representative political contexts, like school districts, generate massive volumes of feedback that overwhelm traditional synthesis methods, creating barriers to shared understanding not only between civic…