SYNFACE – A Talking Head Telephone for the Hearing-Impaired

Beskow, Jonas; Karlsson, Inger; Kewley, Jo; Salvi, Giampiero

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-27817-7_173

Cited by 31 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Neither a significant difference in attitude indices between the synthetic and the human talker was found, nor were attitude indices and performance measures correlated in different ways for the synthetic and the human talker. Thus, there is nothing to suggest that reading speech from a synthetic talking face is an essentially more negative experience than reading speech from a human face, which is promising with regard to development of synthetic talking faces as communication aids (e.g., Beskow et al , 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The poorer specification for synthetic visual speech may be due to lack of subtle visual phonetic cues, which becomes especially prominent for the least visually discriminatable phonemes (Lidestam & Beskow, in press). Synthetic talking faces have been used for presenting speech stimuli in research (e.g., Massaro, 1987, 1998), computer‐animated characters may substitute human actors (e.g., Final Fantasy by Sakaguchi & Sakakibara, 2001), and can also be used as communication aids for individuals with hearing impairment (Beskow, Karlsson, Kewley & Salvi, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Motivation and appraisal in perception of poorly specified speech

Lidestam

Beskow²

2006

Scandinavian J Psychology

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Normal-hearing students (n = 72) performed sentence, consonant, and word identification in either A (auditory), V (visual), or AV (audiovisual) modality. The auditory signal had difficult speech-to-noise relations. Talker (human vs. synthetic), topic (no cue vs. cue-words), and emotion (no cue vs. facially displayed vs. cue-words) were varied within groups. After the first block, effects of modality, face, topic, and emotion on initial appraisal and motivation were assessed. After the entire session, effects of modality on longer-term appraisal and motivation were assessed. The results from both assessments showed that V identification was more positively appraised than A identification. Correlations were tentatively interpreted such that evaluation of self-rated performance possibly depends on subjective standard and is reflected on motivation (if below subjective standard, AV group), or on appraisal (if above subjective standard, A group). Suggestions for further research are presented.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivation and appraisal in perception of poorly specified speech

Lidestam

Beskow²

2006

Scandinavian J Psychology

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“…Finally, a synthetic face could be utilised (Massarro, 1998); this would almost certainly remove some of the ecological validity inherent in using recordings of actual speakers, but would allow the comparison of multiple accents across identical talker faces. An additional benefit of such research would be a potential improvement in the effectiveness of 'talking heads' by incorporating accent variation, thereby allowing programmes such as 'Synface' (Beskow, Karlsson, Kewley & Salvi, 2004) to emulate different speakers more closely.…”

Section: Study Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of British regional accent and contextual cue effects on speechreading performance

Irwin

Pilling

Thomas

2011

Speech Communication

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Please cite this article as: Irwin, A., Pilling, M., Thomas, n.M., An analysis of British regional accent and contextual cue effects on speechreading performance, Speech Communication (2011Communication ( ), doi: 10.1016Communication ( /j.specom.2011 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. The findings of this paper suggest that accent type may have an influence upon visual speech intelligibility and as such may impact upon the design, and results, of tests of speechreading ability.

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“…We start from a time-aligned transcription of the speech to be synthesized. The time-aligned transcription can be obtained from a text-to-speech system, if we are synchronizing with synthetic speech, or it can be produced by a phoneme recognizer (as in the Synface system [3]) or a phonetic aligner [33]. Next, an articulatory control model is applied to convert the time-aligned phonetic transcription of the utterance into control parameter trajectories to drive the articulation of the talking head model.…”

Section: Animated Talking Headmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal Interaction Control

Beskow

Carlson

Edlund

et al. 2009

Computers in the Human Interaction Loop

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No matter how well hidden our systems are and how well they do their magic unnoticed in the background, there are times when direct interaction between system and human is a necessity. As long as the interaction can take place unobtrusively and without techno-clutter, this is desirable. It is hard to picture a means of interaction less obtrusive and techno-cluttered than spoken communication on human terms. Spoken face-to-face communication is the most intuitive and robust form of communication between humans imaginable. In order to exploit such human spoken communication to its full potential as an interface between human and machine, we need a much better understanding of how the more human-like aspects of spoken communication work.A crucial aspect of face-to-face conversation is what people do and what they take into consideration in order to manage the flow of the interaction. For example, participants in a conversation have to be able to identify places where it is legitimate to begin to talk, as well as to avoid interrupting their interlocutors. The ability to indicate that you want to say something, that somebody else may start talking, or that a dialog partner should refrain from doing so is of equal importance. We call this interaction control.Examples of the features that play a part in interaction control include the production and perception of auditory cues such as intonation patterns, pauses, voice quality, and various disfluencies; visual cues such as gaze, nods, facial expressions, gestures, and visible articulatory movements; and content cues like pragmatic and semantic (in)completeness. People generally seem to use these cues in combination, and to mix them or shift between them seamlessly. By equipping spoken dialog systems with more human-like interaction control abilities, we aim to move interaction between system and human toward the intuitive and robust communication among humans.The bulk of work on interaction control in CHIL has been focused on auditory prosodic cues, but visual cues have also been explored, and especially through the use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) -human-like representations of a system, for example, animated talking heads that are able to interact with a user in a natural way using speech, gesture, and facial expression. ECAs are one way of leveraging

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SYNFACE – A Talking Head Telephone for the Hearing-Impaired

Cited by 31 publications

References 10 publications

Motivation and appraisal in perception of poorly specified speech

Motivation and appraisal in perception of poorly specified speech

An analysis of British regional accent and contextual cue effects on speechreading performance

Multimodal Interaction Control

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