Related papers: Turn-Taking Prediction for Natural Conversational …

Since the first speech recognition systems were built more than 30 years ago, improvement in voice technology has enabled applications such as smart assistants and automated customer support. However, conversation intelligence of the future…

All-neural end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that use a single neural network to transduce audio to word sequences have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art results on several tasks. In this work, we examine the…

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is significantly impacted by delayed responses from a spoken dialogue system. Hence, end-to-end (e2e) spoken language understanding (SLU) solutions have recently been proposed to decrease latency. Such…

During conversations, humans are capable of inferring the intention of the speaker at any point of the speech to prepare the following action promptly. Such ability is also the key for conversational systems to achieve rhythmic and natural…

Managing natural dialogue timing is a significant challenge for voice-based chatbots. Most current systems usually rely on simple silence detection, which often fails because human speech patterns involve irregular pauses. This causes bots…

End-to-end speech summarization (E2E SSum) directly summarizes input speech into easy-to-read short sentences with a single model. This approach is promising because it, in contrast to the conventional cascade approach, can utilize full…

An end-to-end (e2e) text-to-speech (TTS) system is a deep architecture that learns to associate a text string with acoustic speech patterns from a curated dataset. It is expected that all aspects associated with speech production, such as…

The black-box nature of end-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) systems makes it difficult to understand how source language inputs are being mapped to the target language. To solve this problem, we would like to simultaneously generate…

We propose a semi-supervised learning method for building end-to-end rich transcription-style automatic speech recognition (RT-ASR) systems from small-scale rich transcription-style and large-scale common transcription-style datasets. In…

This paper presents our latest investigation on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) for overlapped speech. We propose to train an end-to-end system conditioned on speaker embeddings and further improved by transfer learning from…

The latency bottleneck of traditional text-to-speech (TTS) systems fundamentally hinders the potential of streaming large language models (LLMs) in conversational AI. These TTS systems, typically trained and inferenced on complete…

This paper introduces a novel approach called sentence-wise speech summarization (Sen-SSum), which generates text summaries from a spoken document in a sentence-by-sentence manner. Sen-SSum combines the real-time processing of automatic…

Dysfluent speech detection is the bottleneck for disordered speech analysis and spoken language learning. Current state-of-the-art models are governed by rule-based systems which lack efficiency and robustness, and are sensitive to template…

End-to-end speech-in speech-out dialogue systems are emerging as a powerful alternative to traditional ASR-LLM-TTS pipelines, generating more natural, expressive responses with significantly lower latency. However, these systems remain…

Fluid turn-taking remains a key challenge in human-robot interaction. Self-supervised speech representations (S3Rs) have driven many advances, but it remains unclear whether S3R-based turn-taking models rely on prosodic cues, lexical cues…

Streaming Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in voice assistants can utilize prefetching to partially hide the latency of response generation. Prefetching involves passing a preliminary ASR hypothesis to downstream systems in order to…

Current spoken dialogue systems initiate their turns after a long period of silence (700-1000ms), which leads to little real-time feedback, sluggish responses, and an overall stilted conversational flow. Humans typically respond within…

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on speech translation tasks. However, the model architecture is not efficient enough for streaming scenarios since self-attention is computed over an entire input sequence…

Multi-turn dialogues are essential in many real-world applications of large language models, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. As conversation histories become longer, existing large language models face increasing computational and…

Evaluation of conversational naturalness is essential for developing human-like speech agents. However, existing speech naturalness predictors are often designed to assess utterances from a single speaker, failing to capture…