Automatic Evaluation of Turn-taking Cues in Conversational Speech SynthesisShow others and affiliations
2023 (English)In: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2023, International Speech Communication Association , 2023, p. 5481-5485Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Turn-taking is a fundamental aspect of human communication where speakers convey their intention to either hold, or yield, their turn through prosodic cues. Using the recently proposed Voice Activity Projection model, we propose an automatic evaluation approach to measure these aspects for conversational speech synthesis. We investigate the ability of three commercial, and two open-source, Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems ability to generate turn-taking cues over simulated turns. By varying the stimuli, or controlling the prosody, we analyze the models performances. We show that while commercial TTS largely provide appropriate cues, they often produce ambiguous signals, and that further improvements are possible. TTS, trained on read or spontaneous speech, produce strong turn-hold but weak turn-yield cues. We argue that this approach, that focus on functional aspects of interaction, provides a useful addition to other important speech metrics, such as intelligibility and naturalness.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
International Speech Communication Association , 2023. p. 5481-5485
Keywords [en]
human-computer interaction, text-to-speech, turn-taking
National Category
Natural Language Processing Computer Sciences General Language Studies and Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-337873DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-2064ISI: 001186650305133Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85171597862OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-337873DiVA, id: diva2:1803872
Conference
24th International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech 2023, August 20-24, 2023, Dublin, Ireland
Projects
tmh_turntaking
Note
QC 20241024
2023-10-102023-10-102025-02-01Bibliographically approved