A Preliminary Study of Eye-Gaze Controlled Vowel Synthesis

In this study, an attempt to produce vowel sounds by means of an eye-gaze interface system was made. A vocal tract mapping interface which can configure the vocal tract shape and produce vowel sounds was combined with an eye-gaze interface system using socket connection. Taking advantage of one-click operation for configuring the vocal tract shape, a user can produce continuous change in the vocal tract shape by moving the eye-gaze position on the window of the mapping interface. Preliminary experiments were performed to investigate the potential of the proposed system. Although there were variations in the pointing accuracy among users, a skilled user was able to move his/her eye-gaze point with high reproducibility and successfully produce continuous vowel sounds.