17 Ways to Say Yes:
Toward Nuanced Tone of Voice in AAC and Speech Technology

Abstract

People with complex communication needs who use speech-generating devices have very little expressive control over their tone of voice. Despite its importance in human interaction, the issue of tone of voice remains all but absent from AAC research and development however. In this paper, we describe three interdisciplinary projects, past, present and future: The critical design collection Six Speaking Chairs has provoked deeper discussion and inspired a social model of tone of voice; the speculative concept Speech Hedge illustrates challenges and opportunities in designing more expressive user interfaces; the pilot project Tonetable could enable participatory research and seed a research network around tone of voice. We speculate that more radical interactions might expand frontiers of AAC and disrupt speech technology as a whole.

Keywords::

• Expressiveness
• Intonation
• Speech-generating devices
• Interaction design
• Participatory design

Notes

Acknowledgements

This paper draws from a presentation (Pullin, 2012) at the AAC–RERC State of the Science Conference, and the authors’ doctoral dissertations (Pullin, 2013; Hennig, 2013).

Six Speaking Chairs was in partnership with Andrew Cook, whose dissertation research (Cook, 2013) was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Speech Hedge was with Ryan McLeod, Babble Objects Babble Actions with Rosie Barthram. Tonetable is a collaboration between the authors, assisted by Marilia Ferreira through the Brazilian Government's Science Without Borders scholarship programme.

Further thanks to Andrew Cook, Alan Newell, Norman Alm, Peter Gregor, and Jeff Higginbotham for their inspiring contributions to this research.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. Lightwriter^® is a trademark of Toby Churchill, Ltd.

2. iPod Shuffle^® and iTunes^® are trademarks of Apple Inc.

3. Tango^® is a trademark of Dynavox

4. Adobe Color CC is an application from Adobe Systems Inc.