Summary of the paper
| Title | Alert!... Calm Down, There is Nothing to Worry About. Warning and Soothing Speech Synthesis |
|---|---|
| Authors | Milan Rusko, Sakhia Darjaa, Marian Trnka, Marian Ritomsky and Robert Sabo |
| Abstract | Presence of appropriate acoustic cues of affective features in the synthesized speech can be a prerequisite for the proper evaluation of the semantic content by the message recipient. In the recent work the authors have focused on the research of expressive speech synthesis capable of generating naturally sounding synthetic speech at various levels of arousal. The synthesizer should be able to produce speech in Slovak in different styles from extremely urgent warnings, insisting messages, alerts, through comments, and neutral style speech to soothing messages and very calm speech. A three-step method was used for recording both - the high-activation and low-activation expressive speech databases. The acoustic properties of the obtained databases are discussed. Several synthesizers with different levels of arousal were designed using these databases and their outputs are compared to the original voice of the voice talent. A possible ambiguity of acoustic cues is pointed out and the relevance of the semantic meaning of the sentences both in the sentence set for the speech database recording and in the set for subjective synthesizer testing is discussed. |
| Topics | Speech Resource/Database, Emotion Recognition/Generation |
Full paper  |
Alert!... Calm Down, There is Nothing to Worry About. Warning and Soothing Speech Synthesis |
| Bibtex | @InProceedings{RUSKO14.722, author = {Milan Rusko and Sakhia Darjaa and Marian Trnka and Marian Ritomsky and Robert Sabo}, title = {Alert!... Calm Down, There is Nothing to Worry About. Warning and Soothing Speech Synthesis}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)}, year = {2014}, month = {may}, date = {26-31}, address = {Reykjavik, Iceland}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Hrafn Loftsson and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-8-4}, language = {english} } |