DocumentCode :
980789
Title :
Conversational speech synthesis and the need for some laughter
Author :
Campbell, Nick
Author_Institution :
Commun. Technol. & the Speech & Acoust. Process. Dept., Nat. Inst. of Inf., Kyoto
Volume :
14
Issue :
4
fYear :
2006
fDate :
7/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Firstpage :
1171
Lastpage :
1178
Abstract :
This paper reports progress in the synthesis of conversational speech, from the viewpoint of work carried out on the analysis of a very large corpus of expressive speech in normal everyday situations. With recent developments in concatenative techniques, speech synthesis has overcome the barrier of realistically portraying extra-linguistic information by using the actual voice of a recognizable person as a source for units, combined with minimal use of signal processing. However, the technology still faces the problem of expressing paralinguistic information, i.e., the variety in the types of speech and laughter that a person might use in everyday social interactions. Paralinguistic modification of an utterance portrays the speaker´s affective states and shows his or her relationships with the speaker through variations in the manner of speaking, by means of prosody and voice quality. These inflections are carried on the propositional content of an utterance, and can perhaps be modeled by rule, but they are also expressed through nonverbal utterances, the complexity of which may be beyond the capabilities of many current synthesis methods. We suggest that this problem may be solved by the use of phrase-sized utterance units taken intact from a large corpus
Keywords :
linguistics; speech synthesis; concatenative techniques; conversational speech synthesis; laughter; nonverbal utterance; paralinguistic information; prosody; signal processing; social interaction; Communications technology; Helium; Humans; Natural languages; Signal processing; Speech analysis; Speech processing; Speech recognition; Speech synthesis; Technology management; Affect; conversation; emotion; expression; laughter; nonverbal; social interaction; speech synthesis;
fLanguage :
English
Journal_Title :
Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Transactions on
Publisher :
ieee
ISSN :
1558-7916
Type :
jour
DOI :
10.1109/TASL.2006.876131
Filename :
1643646
Link To Document :
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