Related papers: Identifying synthetic voices qualities for convers…

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users…

User ratings play a significant role in spoken dialogue systems. Typically, such ratings tend to be averaged across all users and then utilized as feedback to improve the system or personalize its behavior. While this method can be useful…

Conversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work…

The quality of human voice plays an important role across various fields like music, speech therapy, and communication, yet it lacks a universally accepted, objective definition. Instead, voice quality is referred to using subjective…

Recent works demonstrate that voice assistants do not perform equally well for everyone, but research on demographic robustness of speech technologies is still scarce. This is mainly due to the rarity of large datasets with controlled…

Serious illness conversations (SICs) align care with patients' values, goals, and preferences, yet they rarely occur in emergency departments (EDs), where time constraints and emotional burden often leave clinicians making high-stakes…

Virtual and augmented reality communication platforms are seen as promising modalities for next-generation remote face-to-face interactions. Our study attempts to explore non-verbal communication features in relation to their conversation…

We present a diachronic acoustic analysis of the voice of 1023 speakers from French media archives. The speakers are spread across 32 categories based on four periods (years 1955/56, 1975/76, 1995/96, 2015/16), four age groups (20-35;…

Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we…

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a potential solution for mitigating bias in a job interview by hiding the applicants' demographic features. The current study examines the use of a gender-swapped avatar in a virtual job interview that…

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…

This paper investigates the differences occuring in the excitation for different voice qualities. Its goal is two-fold. First a large corpus containing three voice qualities (modal, soft and loud) uttered by the same speaker is analyzed and…

This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and…

While avatars have grown in popularity in social settings, their use in the workplace is still debatable. We conducted a large-scale survey to evaluate knowledge worker sentiment towards avatars, particularly the effects of realism on their…

Virtual humans need to be persuasive in order to promote behaviour change in human users. While several studies have focused on understanding the numerous aspects that influence the degree of persuasion, most of them are limited to dyadic…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved near-human accuracy on curated benchmarks, yet still fail in real-world voice agents under conditions that current evaluations do not systematically cover. Without diagnostic tools…

Older adults are increasingly turning to conversational AI for emotional expression. While prior research has examined general attitudes toward AI companionship, little is known about the specific moments when and why older adults choose AI…

This study investigates Chinese primary school students' acceptance of a social robot for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speaking practice through a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. Integrating the Technology Acceptance…

This study explores human perceptions of intelligent agents by comparing interactions with a humanoid robot and a virtual human avatar, both utilizing GPT-3 for response generation. The study aims to understand how physical and virtual…

Amid the rapid rise of agentic dialogue models, realistic user-simulator studies are essential for tuning effective conversation strategies. This work investigates a sales-oriented agent that adapts its dialogue based on user profiles…