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The rise of AI conversational agents has broadened opportunities to enhance human capabilities across various domains. As these agents become more prevalent, it is crucial to investigate the impact of different affective abilities on their…
In this paper, we extended the method proposed in [21] to enable humans to interact naturally with autonomous agents through vocal and textual conversations. Our extended method exploits the inherent capabilities of pre-trained large…
Anonymity is a powerful component of many participatory media platforms that can afford people greater freedom of expression and protection from external coercion and interference. However, it can be difficult to effectively implement on…
This paper proposes a new architecture for speaker adaptation of multi-speaker neural-network speech synthesis systems, in which an unseen speaker's voice can be built using a relatively small amount of speech data without transcriptions.…
While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…
Voice-based artificial intelligence is increasingly expected to adhere to human social conventions, but can it learn implicit cues that are not explicitly programmed? This study investigates whether state-of-the-art text-to-speech systems…
Large-scale language technologies are increasingly used in various forms of communication with humans across different contexts. One particular use case for these technologies is conversational agents, which output natural language text in…
The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness,…
Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly embedded in daily life, yet their ability to navigate user emotions efficiently is still evolving. This study investigates how users with varying traits -- gender, personality, and cultural…
Problem: Effective patient-centered communication is a core competency for physicians. However, both seasoned providers and medical trainees report decreased confidence in leading conversations on sensitive topics such as goals of care or…
People communicate using both speech and non-verbal signals such as gestures, face expression or body pose. Non-verbal signals impact the meaning of the spoken utterance in an abundance of ways. An absence of non-verbal signals impoverishes…
We study improving social conversational agents by learning from natural dialogue between users and a deployed model, without extra annotations. To implicitly measure the quality of a machine-generated utterance, we leverage signals like…
People talk with diversified styles. For one piece of speech, different talking styles exhibit significant differences in the facial and head pose movements. For example, the "excited" style usually talks with the mouth wide open, while the…
Conversational teachable agents offer a promising platform to support learning, both in the classroom and in remote settings. In this context, the agent takes the role of the novice, while the student takes on the role of teacher. This…
The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains. The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English to…
Mental manipulation, the strategic use of language to covertly influence or exploit others, is a newly emerging task in computational social reasoning. Prior work has focused exclusively on textual conversations, overlooking how…
Conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) in games are typically confined to dialogue between a human player and a virtual agent, where the conversation is initiated and controlled by the player. To create richer, more believable…
Supervised training of speech recognition models requires access to transcribed audio data, which often is not possible due to confidentiality issues. Our approach to this problem is to generate synthetic audio from a text-only corpus using…
User simulation is a promising approach for automatically training and evaluating conversational information access agents, enabling the generation of synthetic dialogues and facilitating reproducible experiments at scale. However, the…
We propose the first approach to automatically and jointly synthesize both the synchronous 3D conversational body and hand gestures, as well as 3D face and head animations, of a virtual character from speech input. Our algorithm uses a CNN…