Related papers: The Talking Robot: Distortion-Robust Acoustic Mode…
Token-based text-to-speech (TTS) models have emerged as a promising avenue for generating natural and realistic speech, yet they grapple with low pronunciation accuracy, speaking style and timbre inconsistency, and a substantial need for…
Voice Assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant typically use a two-stage Spoken Language Understanding pipeline; first, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) component to process customer speech and generate text transcriptions,…
This paper presents a newly developed, simultaneous neural speech-to-speech translation system and its evaluation. The system consists of three fully-incremental neural processing modules for automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine…
Speech-based virtual assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google assistant, and Apple Siri, typically convert users' audio signals to text data through automatic speech recognition (ASR) and feed the text to downstream dialog models for…
Communication among microscopic robots (nanorobots) can coordinate their activities for biomedical tasks. The feasibility of in vivo ultrasonic communication is evaluated for micron-size robots broadcasting into various types of tissues.…
In this paper, we extended the method proposed in [21] to enable humans to interact naturally with autonomous agents through vocal and textual conversations. Our extended method exploits the inherent capabilities of pre-trained large…
End-to-end models have achieved impressive results on the task of automatic speech recognition (ASR). For low-resource ASR tasks, however, labeled data can hardly satisfy the demand of end-to-end models. Self-supervised acoustic…
Speech recognition and speech synthesis models are typically trained separately, each with its own set of learning objectives, training data, and model parameters, resulting in two distinct large networks. We propose a parameter-efficient…
Collaborative robots must effectively communicate their internal state to humans to enable a smooth interaction. Nonverbal communication is widely used to communicate information during human-robot interaction, however, such methods may…
We investigate ways for the exchange of information (explicit communication) among deaf and dumb mobile robots scattered in the plane. We introduce the use of movement-signals (analogously to flight signals and bees waggle) as a mean to…
Modular soft robots combine the strengths of two traditionally separate areas of robotics. As modular robots, they can show robustness to individual failure and reconfigurability; as soft robots, they can deform and undergo large shape…
In recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, a neural vocoder often generates speech samples by solely conditioning on acoustic features predicted from an acoustic model. However, there are always distortions existing in the predicted acoustic…
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…
In this paper, we propose a text-to-speech (TTS)-driven data augmentation method for improving the quality of a non-autoregressive (AR) TTS system. Recently proposed non-AR models, such as FastSpeech 2, have successfully achieved fast…
This paper proposes a new method of natural language acquisition for robots that does not require the conversion of speech to text. Folks'Talks employs voice2voice technology that enables a robot to understand the meaning of what it is told…
The rapid development of neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems enabled its usage in other areas of natural language processing such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) or spoken language translation (SLT). Due to the large number of…
In this work we evaluate the utility of synthetic data for training automatic speech recognition (ASR). We use the ASR training data to train a text-to-speech (TTS) system similar to FastSpeech-2. With this TTS we reproduce the original…
From dating to job interviews, making new friends or simply chatting with the cashier at checkout, engaging in small talk is a vital, everyday social skill. For adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), small talk can be particularly…
The utility of collocating robots largely depends on the easy and intuitive interaction mechanism with the human. If a robot accepts task instruction in natural language, first, it has to understand the user's intention by decoding the…
Artificial speech synthesis has made a great leap in terms of naturalness as recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems are capable of producing speech with similar quality to human recordings. However, not all speaking styles are easy to model:…