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Children are one of the most under-represented groups in speech technologies, as well as one of the most vulnerable in terms of privacy. Despite this, anonymization techniques targeting this population have received little attention. In…
Design for Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) has become more relevant in recent years due to the enormous advances of speech technologies and their growing presence in our everyday lives. Although modern VUIs still present interaction issues,…
Dynamic facial emotion is essential for believable AI-generated avatars, yet most systems remain visually static, limiting their use in simulations like virtual training for investigative interviews with abused children. We present a…
We present Kimi-Audio, an open-source audio foundation model that excels in audio understanding, generation, and conversation. We detail the practices in building Kimi-Audio, including model architecture, data curation, training recipe,…
The rise of AI conversational agents has broadened opportunities to enhance human capabilities across various domains. As these agents become more prevalent, it is crucial to investigate the impact of different affective abilities on their…
Generative models are a popular choice for adult-to-adult voice conversion (VC) because of their efficient way of modelling unlabelled data. To this point their usefulness in producing children speech and in particular adult to child VC has…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
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.…
This paper focuses on the often-overlooked aspect of perceived voice femininity in singing voices. While existing research has examined perceived voice femininity in speech, the same concept has not yet been studied in singing voice. The…
We introduce Jukebox, a model that generates music with singing in the raw audio domain. We tackle the long context of raw audio using a multi-scale VQ-VAE to compress it to discrete codes, and modeling those using autoregressive…
Codec Avatars are a recent class of learned, photorealistic face models that accurately represent the geometry and texture of a person in 3D (i.e., for virtual reality), and are almost indistinguishable from video. In this paper we describe…
Recent advances in AI has made automated analysis of complex media content at scale possible while generating actionable insights regarding character representation along such dimensions as gender and age. Past works focused on quantifying…
Commercial voice assistants are largely feminized and associated with stereotypically feminine traits such as warmth and submissiveness. As these assistants continue to be adopted for everyday uses, it is imperative to understand how the…
As voice assistants (VAs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for emotion-aware systems that can recognize and respond appropriately to user emotions has grown. While significant progress has been made in speech emotion…
Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are paradigms of conversational user interfaces in the form of embodied characters. While ECAs offer various manipulable features, this paper focuses on a study conducted to explore two distinct levels…
We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete theories of…
Individual differences in personality determine our preferences, traits and values, which should similarly hold for the way we express ourselves. With current advancements and transformations of technology and society, text-based…
We present ChildVox, a novel benchmark for characterizing the diverse acoustic signals through which children communicate. Specifically, ChildVox follows the full developmental trajectory from birth through school age, covering…
AI Stories is a proposed interactive dialogue system, that lets children co-create narrative worlds through conversation. Over the next three years this system will be developed and tested within pediatric wards, where it offers a useful…
Understanding emotional signals in older adults is crucial for designing virtual assistants that support their well-being. However, existing affective computing models often face significant limitations: (1) limited availability of datasets…