Synthesising Personality with Neural Speech Synthesis

Shilin Gao, Matthew P. Aylett, David A. Braude, Catherine Lai


Abstract
Matching the personality of conversational agent to the personality of the user can significantly improve the user experience, with many successful examples in text-based chatbots. It is also important for a voice-based system to be able to alter the personality of the speech as perceived by the users. In this pilot study, fifteen voices were rated using Big Five personality traits. Five content-neutral sentences were chosen for the listening tests. The audio data, together with two rated traits (Extroversion and Agreeableness), were used to train a neural speech synthesiser based on one male and one female voices. The effect of altering the personality trait features was evaluated by a second listening test. Both perceived extroversion and agreeableness in the synthetic voices were affected significantly. The controllable range was limited due to a lack of variance in the source audio data. The perceived personality traits correlated with each other and with the naturalness of the speech. Future work can be making a chatbot speak in a voice with a pre-defined or adaptive personality by using personality synthesis in speech together with text-based personality generation.
Anthology ID:
2023.sigdial-1.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Prague, Czechia
Editors:
Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
393–399
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.36
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.36
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shilin Gao, Matthew P. Aylett, David A. Braude, and Catherine Lai. 2023. Synthesising Personality with Neural Speech Synthesis. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 393–399, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Synthesising Personality with Neural Speech Synthesis (Gao et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.36.pdf