Related papers: How does a spontaneously speaking conversational a…

An important aspect of developing conversational agents is to give a bot the ability to improve through communicating with humans and to learn from the mistakes that it makes. Most research has focused on learning from fixed training sets…

Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…

Different people have different facial expressions while speaking emotionally. A realistic facial animation system should consider such identity-specific speaking styles and facial idiosyncrasies to achieve high-degree of naturalness and…

The ubiquity of smartphones has led to an increase in on demand healthcare being supplied. For example, people can share their illness-related experiences with others similar to themselves, and healthcare experts can offer advice for better…

In our previous work, we derived the acoustic features, that contribute to the perception of warmth and competence in synthetic speech. As an extension, in our current work, we investigate the impact of the derived vocal features in the…

The rapid spread of media content synthesis technology and the potentially damaging impact of audio and video deepfakes on people's lives have raised the need to implement systems able to detect these forgeries automatically. In this work…

This paper proposes a speech synthesis system that allows users to specify and control the acoustic characteristics of a speaker by means of prompts describing the speaker's traits of synthesized speech. Unlike previous approaches, our…

In recent years, prompting has quickly become one of the standard ways of steering the outputs of generative machine learning models, due to its intuitive use of natural language. In this work, we propose a system conditioned on embeddings…

This paper focuses on enhancing human-agent communication by integrating spatial context into virtual agents' non-verbal behaviors, specifically gestures. Recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have primarily utilized data-driven…

To foster effective human-agent interactions, designers must understand how vocal cues influence the perception of agent personality and the role of user-agent alignment in shaping these perceptions. In this work, we examine whether users…

Emotional speech synthesis aims to synthesize human voices with various emotional effects. The current studies are mostly focused on imitating an averaged style belonging to a specific emotion type. In this paper, we seek to generate speech…

Linear programming (LP) problems are pervasive in real-life applications. However, despite their apparent simplicity, an untrained user may find it difficult to determine the linear model of their specific problem. We envisage the creation…

This paper introduces "Synthetic Interlocutors" for ethnographic research. Synthetic Interlocutors are chatbots ingested with ethnographic textual material (interviews and observations) by using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). We…

With read-aloud speech synthesis achieving high naturalness scores, there is a growing research interest in synthesising spontaneous speech. However, human spontaneous face-to-face conversation has both spoken and non-verbal aspects (here,…

Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism may be inevitable due to the choice of medium, conscious and unconscious design choices can guide…

In this paper we study the impact of augmenting spoken language corpora with domain-specific synthetic samples for the purpose of training a speech recognition system. Using both a conventional neural TTS system and a zero-shot one with…

Inner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process which refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argue that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system, which simulates human inner…

Task-oriented conversational systems are essential for efficiently addressing diverse user needs, yet their development requires substantial amounts of high-quality conversational data that is challenging and costly to obtain. While large…

The goal of this contribution is to use a parametric speech synthesis system for reducing background noise and other interferences from recorded speech signals. In a first step, Hidden Markov Models of the synthesis system are trained. Two…

Advances in machine intelligence have enabled conversational interfaces that have the potential to radically change the way humans interact with machines. However, even with the progress in the abilities of these agents, there remain…