Related papers: How does a spontaneously speaking conversational a…
Modern speech synthesis techniques can produce natural-sounding speech given sufficient high-quality data and compute resources. However, such data is not readily available for many languages. This paper focuses on speech synthesis for…
Automated rationale generation is an approach for real-time explanation generation whereby a computational model learns to translate an autonomous agent's internal state and action data representations into natural language. Training on…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…
Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to express a target utterance with the proper speaking style in a user-agent conversation setting. Existing CSS methods employ effective multi-modal context modeling techniques to achieve empathy…
The ubiquitous nature of chatbots and their interaction with users generate an enormous amount of data. Can we improve chatbots using this data? A self-feeding chatbot improves itself by asking natural language feedback when a user is…
Neural Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is a powerful technology that can generate speech using neural networks. One of the most remarkable features of TTS synthesis is its capability to produce speech in the voice of different speakers. This…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been used as an effective means to study emergent communication between agents, yet little focus has been given to continuous acoustic communication. This would be more akin to human language…
A conversational agent (chatbot) is a piece of software that is able to communicate with humans using natural language. Modeling conversation is an important task in natural language processing and artificial intelligence. While chatbots…
Socially fluent agentic AI can now participate in online interaction in ways that resemble ordinary human conversation, potentially weakening people's ability to infer who is human from conversational signals alone. We tested this…
Novel text-to-speech systems can generate entirely new voices that were not seen during training. However, it remains a difficult task to efficiently create personalized voices from a high-dimensional speaker space. In this work, we use…
Training dialog policies for speech-based virtual assistants requires a plethora of conversational data. The data collection phase is often expensive and time consuming due to human involvement. To address this issue, a common solution is…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to the proliferation of artificial agents in social contexts, ranging from education to online social media and financial markets, among many others. The increasing rate at which…
In order to communicate, humans flatten a complex representation of ideas and their attributes into a single word or a sentence. We investigate the impact of representation learning in artificial agents by developing graph referential…
Despite growing interest in applications based on natural customer support conversations, there exist remarkably few publicly available datasets that reflect the expected characteristics of conversations in these settings. Existing…
The capacity to create realistic virtual humans has progressed significantly, and such characters can be found in many applications across entertainment, education and health. As an essential element of interactive virtual humans,…
The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…
Generative AI powers a growing wave of companion chatbots, yet principles for fostering genuine connection remain unsettled. We test two routes: visible user authorship versus covert language-style mimicry. In a preregistered 3x2 experiment…
By representing speaker characteristic as a single fixed-length vector extracted solely from speech, we can train a neural multi-speaker speech synthesis model by conditioning the model on those vectors. This model can also be adapted to…
Does speaking style variation affect humans' ability to distinguish individuals from their voices? How do humans compare with automatic systems designed to discriminate between voices? In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by…
This work presents an overarching perspective on the role that machine intelligence can play in enhancing human abilities, especially those that have been diminished due to injury or illness. As a primary contribution, we develop the…