6 accepted papers
In order to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of Audience Response System (ARS) in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) evaluations, we revisit three previously published TTS studies and perform an ARS-based evaluation on the stimuli used in each study. The experiments are performed with a particip…
Recent advancements in spontaneous text-to-speech (TTS) have enabled the realistic synthesis of creaky voice, a voice quality known for its diverse pragmatic and paralinguistic functions. In this study, we used synthesized creaky voice in perceptual tests, to explore how listeners without formal tra…
Spontaneous speech has many affective and pragmatic functions that are interesting and challenging to model in TTS. However, the presence of reduced articulation, fillers, repetitions, and other disfluencies in spontaneous speech make the text and acoustics less aligned than in read speech, which is…
Breathing and speech planning in spontaneous speech are coordinated processes, often exhibiting disfluent patterns. While synthetic speech is not subject to respiratory needs, integrating breath into synthesis has advantages for naturalness and recall. At the same time, a synthetic voice reproducing…
This paper considers utilising breaths to create improved spontaneous-speech corpora for conversational text-to-speech from found audio recordings such as dialogue podcasts. Breaths are of interest since they relate to prosody and speech planning and are independent of language and transcription. Sp…
Joint attention has been shown to be not only crucial for human-human interaction but also human-robot interaction. Joint attention can help to make cooperation more efficient, support disambiguation in instances of uncertainty and make interactions appear more natural and familiar. In this paper, w…