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Persuasion is a fundamental aspect of communication, influencing decision-making across diverse contexts, from everyday conversations to high-stakes scenarios such as politics, marketing, and law. The rise of conversational AI systems has…
Computational developments--particularly artificial intelligence--are reshaping social scientific research and raise new questions for in-depth methods such as ethnography and qualitative interviewing. Building on classic debates about…
Voice-enabled interactions provide more human-like experiences in many popular IoT systems. Cloud-based speech analysis services extract useful information from voice input using speech recognition techniques. The voice signal is a rich…
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…
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…
Voice assistants (VAs) are typically evaluated through task performance metrics and self-report questionnaires, but people's voices themselves carry rich paralinguistic cues that reveal affect, effort, and interaction breakdowns. We present…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a goal-oriented psychotherapy for mental health concerns implemented in a conversational setting with broad empirical support for its effectiveness across a range of presenting problems and client…
We present the first English corpus study on abusive language towards three conversational AI systems gathered "in the wild": an open-domain social bot, a rule-based chatbot, and a task-based system. To account for the complexity of the…
The advancements of AI-synthesized human voices have introduced a growing threat of impersonation and disinformation. It is therefore of practical importance to developdetection methods for synthetic human voices. This work proposes a new…
Voice cloning is the task of learning to synthesize the voice of an unseen speaker from a few samples. While current voice cloning methods achieve promising results in Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis for a new voice, these approaches lack…
As social robots become more common, many have adopted cute aesthetics aiming to enhance user comfort and acceptance. However, the effect of this aesthetic choice on human feedback in reinforcement learning scenarios remains unclear.…
Existing Voice Cloning (VC) tasks aim to convert a paragraph text to a speech with desired voice specified by a reference audio. This has significantly boosted the development of artificial speech applications. However, there also exist…
Role-playing chatbots built on large language models have drawn interest, but better techniques are needed to enable mimicking specific fictional characters. We propose an algorithm that controls language models via an improved prompt and…
We construct Japanese Idol Speech Corpus (JIS) to advance research in speech generation AI, including text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) and voice conversion (VC). JIS will facilitate more rigorous evaluations of speaker similarity in TTS and…
Cartoonization is a task that renders natural photos into cartoon styles. Previous deep cartoonization methods only have focused on end-to-end translation, which may hinder editability. Instead, we propose a novel solution with editing…
We present JNV (Japanese Nonverbal Vocalizations) corpus, a corpus of Japanese nonverbal vocalizations (NVs) with diverse phrases and emotions. Existing Japanese NV corpora lack phrase or emotion diversity, which makes it difficult to…
Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…
This paper explores public perceptions around the role of affective computing in the workplace. It uses a series of design fictions with 46 UK based participants, unpacking their perspectives on the advantages and disadvantages of tracking…
Pervasive voice interaction enables deceptive patterns through subtle voice characteristics, yet empirical investigation into this manipulation lags behind, especially within major non-English language contexts. Addressing this gap, our…
We present a method for automatically producing human-like vocal imitations of sounds: the equivalent of "sketching," but for auditory rather than visual representation. Starting with a simulated model of the human vocal tract, we first try…