Related papers: EmojiVoice: Towards long-term controllable express…
While the use of social robots for language teaching has been explored, there remains limited work on a task-specific synthesized voices for language teaching robots. Given that language is a verbal task, this gap may have severe…
Human speech goes beyond the mere transfer of information; it is a profound exchange of emotions and a connection between individuals. While Text-to-Speech (TTS) models have made huge progress, they still face challenges in controlling the…
Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots…
Emoji have become ubiquitous in written communication, on the Web and beyond. They can emphasize or clarify emotions, add details to conversations, or simply serve decorative purposes. This casual use, however, barely scratches the surface…
Large speech generation models are evolving from single-speaker, short sentence synthesis to multi-speaker, long conversation geneartion. Current long-form speech generation models are predominately constrained to dyadic, turn-based…
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…
Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen…
The frequent use of Emojis on social media platforms has created a new form of multimodal social interaction. Developing methods for the study and representation of emoji semantics helps to improve future multimodal communication systems.…
Robotic assistants reduce the manual efforts being put in by humans in their day-to-day tasks. In this paper, we develop a voice-controlled personal assistant robot. The robot takes the human voice commands by its own built-in microphone.…
State-of-the-art speech synthesis models try to get as close as possible to the human voice. Hence, modelling emotions is an essential part of Text-To-Speech (TTS) research. In our work, we selected FastSpeech2 as the starting point and…
Modern TTS systems are capable of creating highly realistic and natural-sounding speech. Despite these developments, the process of customizing TTS voices remains a complex task, mostly requiring the expertise of specialists within the…
Social robots aim to establish long-term bonds with humans through engaging conversation. However, traditional conversational approaches, reliant on scripted interactions, often fall short in maintaining engaging conversations. This paper…
Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have been driven by large, multi-domain speech corpora, yet the expressive potential of audiobook data remains underexamined. We argue that human-narrated audiobooks, particularly fictional works,…
Generating emotional language is a key step towards building empathetic natural language processing agents. However, a major challenge for this line of research is the lack of large-scale labeled training data, and previous studies are…
Machine-generated speech is characterized by its limited or unnatural emotional variation. Current text to speech systems generates speech with either a flat emotion, emotion selected from a predefined set, average variation learned from…
Collaborative robots must quickly adapt to their partner's intent and preferences to proactively identify helpful actions. This is especially true in situated settings where human partners can continually teach robots new high-level…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
Novel text-to-speech systems can generate entirely new voices that were not seen during training. However, it remains a difficult task to efficiently create personalized voices from a high-dimensional speaker space. In this work, we use…
Speech synthesis has significantly advanced from statistical methods to deep neural network architectures, leading to various text-to-speech (TTS) models that closely mimic human speech patterns. However, capturing nuances such as emotion…
People change their tones of voice, often accompanied by nonverbal vocalizations (NVs) such as laughter and cries, to convey rich emotions. However, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems lack the capability to generate speech with rich…