Related papers: Identifying synthetic voices qualities for convers…
We address the problem of designing a conversational avatar capable of a sequence of casual conversations with older adults. Users at risk of loneliness, social anxiety or a sense of ennui may benefit from practicing such conversations in…
Age and gender recognition in the wild is a highly challenging task: apart from the variability of conditions, pose complexities, and varying image quality, there are cases where the face is partially or completely occluded. We present…
Large Language Models and commercial speech synthesis systems now enable highly realistic AI-generated voice scams (vishing), raising urgent concerns about deception at scale. Yet it remains unclear whether individuals can reliably…
Generative agents powered by Large Language Models demonstrate human-like characteristics through sophisticated natural language interactions. Their ability to assume roles and personalities based on predefined character biographies has…
AI is promising in assisting UX evaluators with analyzing usability tests, but its judgments are typically presented as non-interactive visualizations. Evaluators may have questions about test recordings, but have no way of asking them.…
Any-to-any voice conversion aims to convert the voice from and to any speakers even unseen during training, which is much more challenging compared to one-to-one or many-to-many tasks, but much more attractive in real-world scenarios. In…
Modern machine learning models for audio tasks often exhibit superior performance on English and other well-resourced languages, primarily due to the abundance of available training data. This disparity leads to an unfair performance gap…
While voice technologies increasingly serve aging populations, current systems exhibit significant performance gaps due to inadequate training data capturing elderly-specific vocal characteristics like presbyphonia and dialectal variations.…
As generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT become more common in higher education, understanding student attitudes is essential for evaluating their educational impact and supporting responsible AI integration. This study introduces a…
Voice disorders affect a large portion of the population, especially heavy voice users such as teachers or call-center workers. Most voice disorders can be treated effectively with behavioral voice therapy, which teaches patients to replace…
Virtual agents are becoming a prominent channel of interaction in customer service. Not all customer interactions are smooth, however, and some can become almost comically bad. In such instances, a human agent might need to step in and…
The way infants use auditory cues to learn to speak despite the acoustic mismatch of their vocal apparatus is a hot topic of scientific debate. The simulation of early vocal learning using articulatory speech synthesis offers a way towards…
Collecting high-quality training data is essential for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). However, acquiring such data is often costly and time-consuming, especially for non-English languages such as Italian. Recently, researchers…
The voice conversion challenge is a bi-annual scientific event held to compare and understand different voice conversion (VC) systems built on a common dataset. In 2020, we organized the third edition of the challenge and constructed and…
Generative adversarial network-based models have shown remarkable performance in the field of speech enhancement. However, the current optimization strategies for these models predominantly focus on refining the architecture of the…
Smart voice assistants (SVAs) are embedded in the daily lives of youth, yet their privacy controls often remain opaque and difficult to manage. Through five semi-structured focus groups (N=26) with young Canadians (ages 16-24), we…
Identity, accent, style, and emotions are essential components of human speech. Voice conversion (VC) techniques process the speech signals of two input speakers and other modalities of auxiliary information such as prompts and emotion…
To improve user experience, Alexa now allows users to consent to data sharing via voice rather than directing them to the companion smartphone app. While verbal consent mechanisms for voice assistants (VAs) can increase usability, they can…
As large-scale speech-to-speech models achieve high fidelity, the distinction between synthetic voices in structured environments becomes a vital area of study. This paper introduces Advosynth-500, a specialized dataset comprising 100…
Objective: This paper introduces a patient simulator for scalable, automated evaluation of healthcare conversational agents, generating realistic, controllable interactions that systematically vary across medical, linguistic, and behavioral…