Talking heads - communication, articulation and animation

Human speech communication relies not only on audition, but also on vision, especially during poor acoustic conditions. The face is an important carrier of both linguistic and extra-linguistic information. Using computer graphics it is possible to synthesize faces and do audio-visual text-to-speech synthesis, a technique that has a number of interesting applications for example in the area of man-machine interfaces. At KTH, a system for rule-based audio-visual text-tospeech synthesis has been developed. The system is based on the KTH text-tospeech system which has been complemented with a three-dimensional parametric model of a human face, that is animated in real time in synchrony with the auditory speech. The audio-visual text-to-speech synthesis has also been incorporated into a system for spoken man-machine dialogue.