speech synthesis Papers

Spontaneous conversational speech has many characteristics that are currently not modelled well by HMM-based speech synthesis and in order to build synthetic voices that can give an impression of someone partaking in a conversation, we need to utilise data that exhibits more of the speech phenomena associated with conversations than the more generally used carefully read aloud sentences. In this paper we show that synthetic voices built with HMM-based speech synthesis techniques from conversational speech... Read more

The current practice in virtual human dialogue systems is to use professional human recordings or limited-domain speech synthesis. Both approaches lead to good performance but at a high cost. To determine the best trade-off between performance and cost, we perform a systematic evaluation of human and synthesized voices with regard to naturalness, conversational aspect, and likability. We also vary the type (in-domain vs. out-of-domain), length, and content of utterances, and take into account the age... Read more

In this article we present the subject of virtual assistants, which constitute computer applications based on artificial intelligence technologies (such as Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Speech Synthesis etc.) that are implemented on companies' commercial websites. We present virtual assistants features, and we discuss their important aspects. We point out contribution of virtual assistants in establishing and maintaining customer relations, and we analyze a possibility of modeling business processes using virtual assistants. Finally, we draw... Read more

Unit selection speech synthesis has reached high levels of naturalness and intelligibility for neutral read aloud speech. However, synthetic speech generated using neutral read aloud data lacks all the attitude, intention and spontaneity associated with everyday conversations. Unit selection is heavily data dependent and thus in order to simulate human conversational speech, or create synthetic voices for believable virtual characters, we need to utilise speech data with examples of how people talk rather than how... Read more

Speech is not a common way to interact with an artwork, but recent advances in Artificial Intelligence imply challenges and opportunities to explore new kinds of experiences in the confrontation of the spectator to the artwork. In order to have flexibility in experimentation by performing different art-installations, we have developed and implemented the concept of Talking Agent, a reusable software component with the ability to recognize human speech and synthesize a spoken response, and to... Read more

In this paper we present RealActor, a character behavior realization system for embodied conversational agents based on the Behavior Markup Language (BML). Developed several years ago as part of the SAIBA framework, BML is an XML dialect for describing physical realizations of multimodal human behaviors. It allows modeling of complex communicative utterances which include both verbal and non-verbal behavior. BML elements represent various primitive actions (e.g. speech, facial and body gestures) and multimodal behavior can... Read more

This paper presents the NECA approach to the generation of dialogues between Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). This approach consist of the automated constructtion of an abstract script for an entire dialogue (cast in terms of dialogue acts), which is incrementally enhanced by a series of modules and finally ”performed” by means of text, speech and body language, by a cast of ECAs. The approach makes it possible to automatically produce a large variety of highly... Read more

In this paper we wish to describe special version of Ivona Speech Synthesis System with US English voice developed in IVO Software for The Blizzard Challenge 2007. Current system is based on improved speech synthesis technique originally developed for the previous challenge - The Blizzard Challenge 2006. An evaluation made by different Blizzard listeners groups, which gave the highest Mean Opinion Score to Ivona shows us, that nowadays Ivona is one of the top of... Read more