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Synthesizing expressive Japanese character speech poses unique challenges due to pitch-accent sensitivity and stylistic variability. This paper empirically evaluates two open-source text-to-speech models--VITS and Style-BERT-VITS2 JP Extra…
The proliferation of voice agents in consumer devices requires new tools for evaluating these systems beyond their technical functionality. This paper presents a toolkit for the evaluation of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) with the intention…
Sex classification of children's voices allows for an investigation of the development of secondary sex characteristics which has been a key interest in the field of speech analysis. This research investigated a broad range of acoustic…
Advances in natural language processing and understanding have led to a rapid growth in the popularity of conversational user interfaces (CUIs). While CUIs introduce novel benefits, they also yield risks that may exploit people's trust.…
The goal of voice conversion is to transform source speech into a target voice, keeping the content unchanged. In this paper, we focus on self-supervised representation learning for voice conversion. Specifically, we compare discrete and…
The gender of any voice user interface is a key element of its perceived identity. Recently, there has been increasing interest in interfaces where the gender is ambiguous rather than clearly identifying as female or male. This work…
While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a…
Explainable AI (XAI) algorithms aim to help users understand how a machine learning model makes predictions. To this end, many approaches explain which input features are most predictive of a target label. However, such explanations can…
We describe a machine-learning approach to pitch correcting a solo singing performance in a karaoke setting, where the solo voice and accompaniment are on separate tracks. The proposed approach addresses the situation where no musical score…
We introduce Audio Personas, enabling users to "decorate" themselves with body-anchored sounds in audio augmented reality. Like outfits, makeup, and fragrances, audio personas offer an alternative yet dynamic channel to augment face-to-face…
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has several virtual humans applications for content creation and editing. While several existing methods provide solutions for speech-driven animation, precise control over content (what) and style (how) of…
This study compares the performances of different algorithms for coding speech at low bit rates. In addition to widely deployed traditional vocoders, a selection of recently developed generative-model-based coders at different bit rates are…
We explore Jouzu, a Japanese language learning application that integrates large language models with anime-inspired conversational agents. Designed to address challenges learners face in practicing natural and expressive dialogue, Jouzu…
Artificially generated speech is increasingly embedded in everyday life. Voice cloning in particular enables applications where identity preservation is important, such as completing a recording, dubbing in a new language, or preserving the…
Voice-based artificial intelligence is increasingly expected to adhere to human social conventions, but can it learn implicit cues that are not explicitly programmed? This study investigates whether state-of-the-art text-to-speech systems…
While human-AI collaboration has been a longstanding goal and topic of study for computational research, the emergence of increasingly naturalistic generative AI language models has greatly inflected the trajectory of such research. In this…
With the development of Internet culture, cuteness has become a popular concept. Many people are curious about what factors making a person look cute. However, there is rare research to answer this interesting question. In this work, we…
We present an auditory stimulus optimization and a pilot study of a two-step input speller application combined with a spatial auditory brain-computer interface (saBCI) for paralyzed users. The application has been developed for 45, out of…
Current conversational agents (CA) have seen improvement in conversational quality in recent years due to the influence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT3. However, two key categories of problem remain. Firstly there are the unique…
We present a focused analysis of user studies in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) entailing qualitative investigation. We draw on social science corpora to suggest ways for improving the rigor of studies where XAI researchers use…