This study aims at investigating the interface between emotion and intonation patterns (more specifically, duration and pitch amplitude of speech). To this end, the acoustic properties of spectral parameters related to speech prosody are investigated. The results of acoustic and Statistical analysis show that mean level and range of FO in the contours vary strongly as a function of the degree o...

Machine-based emotional intelligence is a requirement for more natural interaction between humans and computer interfaces and a basic level of accurate emotion perception is needed for computer systems to respond adequately to human emotion. Humans convey emotional information both intentionally and unintentionally via speech patterns. These vocal patterns are perceived and understood by listen...

This paper describes the speech interface of a multimodal application developed as part of a study in intelligent multimedia. The application centres on a pet-like autonomous agent “Bouncy” and users communicate with the agent through speech, gestures, and eye contact. The interface concentrates on extra-linguistic properties of the speech signal, pitch and speech rate, involving no actual “spe...

This paper explores the perceptual relevance of acoustical correlates of emotional speech by means of speech synthesis. Besides, the research aims at the development of »emotion− rules« which enable an optimized speech synthesis system to generate emotional speech. Two investigations using this synthesizer are described: 1) the systematic variation of selec− ted acoustical features to gain a pr...

Facial expressions and characteristics of speech are exploited intuitively by humans to infer the emotional status of their partners in communication. This paper investigates ways to extract emotion from spontaneous speech, aiming at transferring emotions to appropriate facial expressions of the speaker’s virtual representatives. Hence, this paper presents one step towards an emotional speechdr...

In this paper, we adopt a difference approach to prosody prediction for emotional text-to-speech synthesis, where the prosodic variations between emotional and neutral speech are decomposed into the global and local prosodic variations and predicted using a two-stage model. The global prosodic variations are modeled by the means and standard deviations of the prosodic parameters, while the loca...

In this paper, we propose to evaluate the quality of emotional speech synthesis by means of an automatic emotion identification system. We test this approach using five different parametric speech synthesis systems, ranging from plain non-emotional synthesis to full re-synthesis of pre-recorded speech. We compare the results achieved with the automatic system to those of human perception tests....

Speech interaction with in-car systems is becoming more commonplace as systems improve. New cars are often equipped with speech recognition systems to dial phone numbers and or control the in-car environment, and with speech output to provide verbal directions from navigation systems. The paper explores the possibilities of richer speech interaction between driver and car with automatic recogni...

Emotional speech synthesis is an important part of the puzzle on the long way to human-like artificial human-machine interaction. During the way, lots of stations like emotional audio messages or believable characters in gaming will be reached. This chapter discusses technical aspects of emotional speech synthesis, shows practical application and highlights new developments concerning the reali...