Related papers: Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Facto…
The Japanese notion of "kawaii" or expressions of cuteness, vulnerability, and/or charm is a global cultural export. Work has explored kawaii-ness as a design feature and factor of user experience in the visual appearance, nonverbal…
Kawaii is the Japanese concept of cute++, a global export with local characteristics. Recent work has explored kawaii as a feature of user experience (UX) with social robots, virtual characters, and voice assistants, i.e., kawaii vocalics.…
Kawaii computing is a new term for a steadily growing body of work on the Japanese notion of "cute" in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice. Kawaii is distinguished from general notions of cute by its experiential and…
The quality of human voice plays an important role across various fields like music, speech therapy, and communication, yet it lacks a universally accepted, objective definition. Instead, voice quality is referred to using subjective…
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…
Humans have a privileged, embodied way to explore the world of sounds, through vocal imitation. The Quantum Vocal Theory of Sounds (QVTS) starts from the assumption that any sound can be expressed and described as the evolution of a…
Recent research has begun to assess people's perceptions of voice user interfaces (VUIs) as dialogue partners, termed partner models. Current self-report measures are only available in English, limiting research to English-speaking users.…
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.…
In text-to-speech, controlling voice characteristics is important in achieving various-purpose speech synthesis. Considering the success of text-conditioned generation, such as text-to-image, free-form text instruction should be useful for…
We present STUDIES, a new speech corpus for developing a voice agent that can speak in a friendly manner. Humans naturally control their speech prosody to empathize with each other. By incorporating this "empathetic dialogue" behavior into…
Computer voice is experiencing a renaissance through the growing popularity of voice-based interfaces, agents, and environments. Yet, how to measure the user experience (UX) of voice-based systems remains an open and urgent question,…
Evaluating 'anime-like' voices currently relies on costly subjective judgments, yet no standardized objective metric exists. A key challenge is that anime-likeness, unlike naturalness, lacks a shared absolute scale, making conventional Mean…
Conversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work…
With the advancement of conversational AI, research on bodily expressions, including gestures and facial expressions, has also progressed. However, many existing studies focus on photorealistic avatars, making them unsuitable for…
Voice is a natural mode of expression offered by modern computer-based systems. Qualitative perspectives on voice-based user experiences (voice UX) offer rich descriptions of complex interactions that numbers alone cannot fully represent.…
We present a method that generates expressive talking heads from a single facial image with audio as the only input. In contrast to previous approaches that attempt to learn direct mappings from audio to raw pixels or points for creating…
Concepts and formalism from acoustics are often used to exemplify quantum mechanics. Conversely, quantum mechanics could be used to achieve a new perspective on acoustics, as shown by Gabor studies. Here, we focus in particular on the study…
The application of psychophysiologicy in human-computer interaction is a growing field with significant potential for future smart personalised systems. Working in this emerging field requires comprehension of an array of physiological…
Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming a feature of our everyday life. Yet, the user experience (UX) is often limited, leading to underuse, disengagement, and abandonment. Co-designing interactions for VAs with potential end-users can be…
AI agents -- systems that execute multi-step reasoning workflows with persistent state, tool access, and specialist skills -- represent a qualitative shift from prior automation technologies in social science. Unlike chatbots that respond…