Related papers: Expressivity and Speech Synthesis
Accented text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis seeks to generate speech with an accent (L2) as a variant of the standard version (L1). Accented TTS synthesis is challenging as L2 is different from L1 in both in terms of phonetic rendering and…
Form about four decades human beings have been dreaming of an intelligent machine which can master the natural speech. In its simplest form, this machine should consist of two subsystems, namely automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech…
The growing prevalence of conversational voice interfaces, powered by developments in both speech and language technologies, raises important questions about their influence on human communication. While written communication can signal…
Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) has witnessed rapid progress in recent years, where neural methods became capable of producing audios with high naturalness. However, these efforts still suffer from two types of latencies: (a) the {\em…
Recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) have improved quality and naturalness to near-human capabilities when considering isolated sentences. But something which is still lacking in order to achieve human-like communication is the dynamic…
Generative AI is not just a technological leap -- it is a societal stress test, reshaping trust, identity, equity, and authorship. This exploratory PhD seminar examined emerging academic trends in AI-driven synthetic media and worlds,…
Automatic synthesis of realistic co-speech gestures is an increasingly important yet challenging task in artificial embodied agent creation. Previous systems mainly focus on generating gestures in an end-to-end manner, which leads to…
Speech synthesis might hold the key to low-resource speech recognition. Data augmentation techniques have become an essential part of modern speech recognition training. Yet, they are simple, naive, and rarely reflect real-world conditions.…
Automated text generation has been applied broadly in many domains such as marketing and robotics, and used to create chatbots, product reviews and write poetry. The ability to synthesize text, however, presents many potential risks, while…
The rapid spread of media content synthesis technology and the potentially damaging impact of audio and video deepfakes on people's lives have raised the need to implement systems able to detect these forgeries automatically. In this work…
Speech AI Technologies are largely trained on publicly available datasets or by the massive web-crawling of speech. In both cases, data acquisition focuses on minimizing collection effort, without necessarily taking the data subjects'…
With read-aloud speech synthesis achieving high naturalness scores, there is a growing research interest in synthesising spontaneous speech. However, human spontaneous face-to-face conversation has both spoken and non-verbal aspects (here,…
In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic…
This position paper discusses the benefits of longitudinal behavioural research with customised AI tools for exploring the opportunities and risks of synthetic relationships. Synthetic relationships are defined as "continuing associations…
Speech synthesis technology has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, enabling the creation of natural and expressive synthetic speech. One area of particular interest is the generation of synthetic child speech, which…
Recent expressive text to speech (TTS) models focus on synthesizing emotional speech, but some fine-grained styles such as intonation are neglected. In this paper, we propose QI-TTS which aims to better transfer and control intonation to…
Modern sequence to sequence neural TTS systems provide close to natural speech quality. Such systems usually comprise a network converting linguistic/phonetic features sequence to an acoustic features sequence, cascaded with a neural…
The development of AI-driven generative audio mirrors broader AI trends, often prioritizing immediate accessibility at the expense of explainability. Consequently, integrating such tools into sustained artistic practice remains a…
Accent plays a significant role in speech communication, influencing one's capability to understand as well as conveying a person's identity. This paper introduces a novel and efficient framework for accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis…
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays a pivotal role in understanding human communication, enabling emotionally intelligent systems, and serving as a fundamental component in the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).…