Related papers: Identifying synthetic voices qualities for convers…
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…
Humans engage in lifelong social interactions through interacting with different people under different scenarios for different social goals. This requires social intelligence to gather information through a long time span and use it to…
Clinical psychology students frequently report feeling underprepared for the interpersonal demands of therapeutic work, highlighting the need for accessible opportunities to practise core counselling skills before seeing real clients.…
With recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, synthetic audiobook narration has seen increased interest, reaching unprecedented levels of naturalness. However, larger gaps remain in synthetic narration systems' ability to…
This study assessed metaverse-based support groups designed to reduce social isolation and suicide risk among LGBTQ+ youths. Using the Cluster platform, enhanced anonymity, avatar-based self-expression, and accessibility were provided. Key…
The creation of virtual humans increasingly leverages automated synthesis of speech and gestures, enabling expressive, adaptable agents that effectively engage users. However, the independent development of voice and gesture generation…
Many children experience challenges in emotional regulation and social interaction, which can limit their participation in everyday activities and therapeutic programs. For socially assistive robots to be effective in this context, it is…
This study explores how age and language shape the deliberate vocal expression of emotion, addressing underexplored user groups, Teenagers (N = 12) and Adults 55+ (N = 12), within speech emotion recognition (SER). While most SER systems are…
Sex classification of children's voices allows for an investigation of the development of secondary sex characteristics which has been a key interest in the field of speech analysis. This research investigated a broad range of acoustic…
Social anxiety (SA) has become increasingly prevalent. Traditional coping strategies often face accessibility challenges. Generative AI (GenAI), known for their knowledgeable and conversational capabilities, are emerging as alternative…
While using a speaker verification (SV) based system in a commercial application, it is important that customers have an inclusive experience irrespective of their gender, age, or ethnicity. In this paper, we analyze the impact of gender…
This paper describes a novel protocol for collecting speech data from subjects induced to have different degrees of trust in the skills of a conversational agent. The protocol consists of an interactive session where the subject is asked to…
We present an end-to-end voice-based conversational agent that is able to engage in naturalistic multi-turn dialogue and align with the interlocutor's conversational style. The system uses a series of deep neural network components for…
Supporting older adults in health self-management is crucial for promoting independent aging, particularly given the growing strain on healthcare systems. While voice assistants (VAs) hold the potential to support aging in place, they often…
Voice assistants (VAs) are typically evaluated through task performance metrics and self-report questionnaires, but people's voices themselves carry rich paralinguistic cues that reveal affect, effort, and interaction breakdowns. We present…
General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly provide young adolescents with emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational style shapes anthropomorphism and emotional reliance.…
When people try to influence others to do something, they subconsciously adjust their speech to include appropriate emotional information. In order for a robot to influence people in the same way, the robot should be able to imitate the…
A growing literature on speech interruptions describes how people interrupt one another with speech, but these behaviours have not yet been implemented in the design of artificial agents which interrupt. Perceptions of a prototype proactive…
Negotiation is a complex social interaction that encapsulates emotional encounters in human decision-making. Virtual agents that can negotiate with humans are useful in pedagogy and conversational AI. To advance the development of such…
One way to improve the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic agents is to have humans empathize with the agents. In this study, we focused on a task between an agent and a human in which the agent makes a mistake. To investigate…