Related papers: EmojiVoice: Towards long-term controllable express…
Text to Speech (TTS) models can generate natural and high-quality speech, but it is not expressive enough when synthesizing speech with dramatic expressiveness, such as stand-up comedies. Considering comedians have diverse personal speech…
Textless speech-to-speech translation systems are rapidly advancing, thanks to the integration of self-supervised learning techniques. However, existing state-of-the-art systems fall short when it comes to capturing and transferring…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
While Current TTS systems perform well in synthesizing high-quality speech, producing highly expressive speech remains a challenge. Emphasis, as a critical factor in determining the expressiveness of speech, has attracted more attention…
Human acceptance of social robots is greatly effected by empathy and perceived understanding. This necessitates accurate and flexible responses to various input data from the user. While systems such as this can become increasingly complex…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
Context: Open source software development has become more social and collaborative, especially with the rise of social coding platforms like GitHub. Since 2016, GitHub started to support more informal methods such as emoji reactions, with…
We introduce TacoBot, a user-centered task-oriented digital assistant designed to guide users through complex real-world tasks with multiple steps. Covering a wide range of cooking and how-to tasks, we aim to deliver a collaborative and…
Mobile messaging apps offer an increasing range of emotional expressions, such as emojis to help users manually augment their texting experiences. Accessibility of such augmentations is limited in voice messaging. With the term "speejis" we…
Human conversation involves language, speech, and visual cues, with each medium providing complementary information. For instance, speech conveys a vibe or tone not fully captured by text alone. While multimodal LLMs focus on generating…
Virtual and robotic agents capable of perceiving human empathy have the potential to participate in engaging and meaningful human-machine interactions that support human well-being. Prior research in computational empathy has focused on…
Text-to-speech (TTS) systems offer the opportunity to compensate for a hearing loss at the source rather than correcting for it at the receiving end. This removes limitations such as time constraints for algorithms that amplify a sound in a…
Emotional voice conversion (EVC) aims to change the emotional state of an utterance while preserving the linguistic content and speaker identity. In this paper, we propose a novel 2-stage training strategy for sequence-to-sequence emotional…
Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans "in the wild"…
Leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to simulate human behaviors when processing multimodal information, especially in the context of social media, has garnered immense interest due to its broad potential and far-reaching implications.…
While acoustic expressiveness has long been studied in expressive text-to-speech (ETTS), the inherent expressiveness in text lacks sufficient attention, especially for ETTS of artistic works. In this paper, we introduce StoryTTS, a highly…
Natural language is the most intuitive medium for us to interact with other people when expressing commands and instructions. However, using language is seldom an easy task when humans need to express their intent towards robots, since most…
Spoken dialogue models currently lack the ability for fine-grained speech style control, a critical capability for human-like interaction that is often overlooked in favor of purely functional capabilities like reasoning and question…
Beyond mere formality, small talk plays a pivotal role in social dynamics, serving as a verbal handshake for building rapport and understanding. For conversational AI and social robots, the ability to engage in small talk enhances their…
Theatrical improvisation (impro or improv) is a demanding form of live, collaborative performance. Improv is a humorous and playful artform built on an open-ended narrative structure which simultaneously celebrates effort and failure. It is…