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We present CharacterChat, a concept and chatbot to support writers in creating fictional characters. Concretely, writers progressively turn the bot into their imagined character through conversation. We iteratively developed CharacterChat…
We explore Jouzu, a Japanese language learning application that integrates large language models with anime-inspired conversational agents. Designed to address challenges learners face in practicing natural and expressive dialogue, Jouzu…
Computer games are widespread nowadays and enjoyed by people of all ages. But when it comes to kids, playing these games can be more than just fun, it is a way for them to develop important skills and build emotional intelligence. Facial…
Chatbots are one class of intelligent, conversational software agents activated by natural language input (which can be in the form of text, voice, or both). They provide conversational output in response, and if commanded, can sometimes…
All robots create consequential sound -- sound produced as a result of the robot's mechanisms -- yet little work has explored how sound impacts human-robot interaction. Recent work shows that the sound of different robot mechanisms affects…
Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…
Vast improvements in natural language understanding and speech recognition have paved the way for conversational interaction with computers. While conversational agents have often been used for short goal-oriented dialog, we know little…
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.…
Recent progress in large language models and multimodal interaction has made it possible to develop AI companions that can have fluent and emotionally expressive conversations. However, many of these systems have problems keeping users…
Advances in natural language processing and understanding have led to a rapid growth in the popularity of conversational user interfaces (CUIs). While CUIs introduce novel benefits, they also yield risks that may exploit people's trust.…
End-to-end spoken dialogue models such as GPT-4o-audio have recently garnered significant attention in the speech domain. However, the evaluation of spoken dialogue models' conversational performance has largely been overlooked. This is…
In an era of human-computer interaction with increasingly agentic AI systems capable of connecting with users conversationally, speech is an important modality for commanding agents. By recognizing and using speech emotions (i.e., how a…
Animations have become increasingly realistic with the evolution of Computer Graphics (CG). In particular, human models and behaviors were represented through animated virtual humans, sometimes with a high level of realism. In particular,…
The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to facilitate collaboration between the artificial intelligence and comparative cognition research communities. In this paper, we present the latest version of the…
Humans have clear cross-modal preferences when matching certain novel words to visual shapes. Evidence suggests that these preferences play a prominent role in our linguistic processing, language learning, and the origins of signal-meaning…
Anime, originated from Japan, is one of the most influential cultural products in modern society and is especially popular among younger generations. The popularity of anime reflects important cultural evolutions in our society. Despite…
This paper investigates the temporal excitation patterns of creaky voice. Creaky voice is a voice quality frequently used as a phrase-boundary marker, but also as a means of portraying attitude, affective states and even social status.…
The interpretation of human voices holds importance across various applications. This study ventures into predicting age, gender, and emotion from vocal cues, a field with vast applications. Voice analysis tech advancements span domains,…
This paper contributes to building a standard process of research and development (R&D) for new user experiences (UX) in metaverse services. We tested this R&D process on a new UX proof of concept (PoC) for Meta Quest head-mounted display…
This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for generating character-specific, emotion-aware speech from comics. The proposed system takes full comic volumes as input and produces speech aligned with each character's dialogue and emotional…