Exploring expressivity and emotion with artificial voice and speech technologies

Abstract

Emotion in audio-voice signals, as synthesized by text-to-speech (TTS) technologies, was investigated to formulate a theory of expression for user interface design. Emotional parameters were specified with markup tags, and the resulting audio was further modulated with post-processing techniques. Software was then developed to link a selected TTS synthesizer with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, producing a chatbot that could speak and listen. Using these two artificial voice subsystems, investigators explored both artistic and psychological implications of artificial speech emotion. Goals of the investigation were interdisciplinary, with interest in musical composition, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), commercial voice announcement applications, human–computer interaction (HCI), and artificial intelligence (AI). The work-in-progress points towards an emerging interdisciplinary ontology for artificial voices. As one study output, HCI tools are proposed for future collaboration.

Key words::

• Artificial emotion
• chatbot
• conversational kiosk
• speech synthesis
• TTS
• voice synthesis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank CereProc and Lumenvox, who donated their technologies for this effort.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflict of interest.

We also would like to thank all colleagues from the EPSRC CreST Network for funding and supporting this work.