Voice user interfaces and digital assistants are rapidly entering our lives becoming singular touch points spanning devices. These always-on services capture transmit audio data to powerful cloud for further processing subsequent actions. Our voices raw signals collected through these devices contain a host of sensitive paralinguistic information that is transmitted service providers regardless...

The present study investigated the effect of fear on paralinguistic aspects of speech in patients suffering from panic disorder with agoraphobia (N = 25). An experiment was conducted that comprised two modules: Autobiographical Talking and Script Talking. Each module consisted of two emotional conditions: Fearful and Happy. Speech was recorded digitally and analyzed using PRAAT, a computer prog...

This study is part of a longer-term project to provide embodied conversational agents (ECAs) with behaviors that enable them to build and maintain rapport with their human partners. We focus on paralinguistic behaviors, and especially nonverbal behaviors, and their role in communicating rapport. Using an ECA that guides its players through a speech-controlled game, we attempt to measure the fam...

In human verbal communication, not only lexical information, but also paralinguistic information plays an important role in transmitting the speakers' mental state. Paralinguistic information is conveyed mainly through acoustic features like pitch, rhythm, tempo and so on. These acoustic features are generally known as prosody. It is known that some species of birds can discriminate certain asp...

In previous work, we proposed a model for speech-to-speech translation that is sensitive to paralinguistic information such as duration and power of spoken words [1]. This model uses linear regression to map source acoustic features to target acoustic features directly and in continuous space. However, while the model is effective, it faces scalability issues as a single model must be trained f...

This paper is concerned with speech-to-speech translation that is sensitive to paralinguistic information. From themany different possible paralinguistic features to handle, in this paper we chose duration and power as a first step, proposing a method that can translate these features from input speech to the output speech in continuous space. This is done in a simple and language-independent f...

In the context of detecting ‘paralinguistic events’ with the aim to make classification of the speaker’s emotional state possible, a detector was developed for one of the most obvious ‘paralinguistic events’, namely laughter. Gaussian Mixture Models were trained with Perceptual Linear Prediction features, pitch&energy, pitch&voicing and modulation spectrum features to model laughter and speech....

In the article we evaluate the importance of different HMM states in an HMM-based feature extraction method used to model paralinguistic information. Specifically, we evaluate the distribution of the paralinguistic information across different states of the HMM in two different classification tasks: emotion recognition and alcoholization detection. In the task of recognizing emotions we found t...

Computer paralinguistic analysis is widely used in security systems, biometric research, call centers and banks. Paralinguistic models estimate different physical properties of voice, such as pitch, intensity, formants harmonics to classify emotions. The main goal find features that would be robust outliers will retain variety human voice at the same time. Moreover, model must able on a time sc...

Most paralinguistic analysis tasks are lacking agreed-upon evaluation procedures and comparability, in contrast to more ‘traditional’ disciplines in speech analysis. The INTERSPEECH 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge shall help overcome the usually low compatibility of results, by addressing three selected subchallenges. In the Age Sub-Challenge, the age of speakers has to be determined in four grou...