Alert!... Calm Down, There is Nothing to Worry About. Warning and Soothing Speech Synthesis.

Milan Rusko, Sakhia Darjaa, Marián Trnka, Marián Ritomský, Róbert Sabo


Abstract
Presence of appropriate acoustic cues of affective features in the synthesized speech can be a prerequisite for the proper evaluation of the semantic content by the message recipient. In the recent work the authors have focused on the research of expressive speech synthesis capable of generating naturally sounding synthetic speech at various levels of arousal. The synthesizer should be able to produce speech in Slovak in different styles from extremely urgent warnings, insisting messages, alerts, through comments, and neutral style speech to soothing messages and very calm speech. A three-step method was used for recording both - the high-activation and low-activation expressive speech databases. The acoustic properties of the obtained databases are discussed. Several synthesizers with different levels of arousal were designed using these databases and their outputs are compared to the original voice of the voice talent. A possible ambiguity of acoustic cues is pointed out and the relevance of the semantic meaning of the sentences both in the sentence set for the speech database recording and in the set for subjective synthesizer testing is discussed.
Anthology ID:
L14-1566
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1182–1187
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/722_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milan Rusko, Sakhia Darjaa, Marián Trnka, Marián Ritomský, and Róbert Sabo. 2014. Alert!... Calm Down, There is Nothing to Worry About. Warning and Soothing Speech Synthesis.. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 1182–1187, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Alert!… Calm Down, There is Nothing to Worry About. Warning and Soothing Speech Synthesis. (Rusko et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/722_Paper.pdf