In this paper we present our study on expressive gibberish speech synthesis as a means for affective communication between computing devices, such as a robot or an avatar, and their users. Gibberish speech consists of vocalizations of meaningless strings of speech sounds and is sometimes used by performing artists to express intended (and often exaggerated) emotions and affect, such as anger and surprise, without actually pronouncing any understandable word. The advantage of gibberish in affective computing lies with the fact that no understandable text has to be pronounced and that only affect is conveyed. This can be used to test the effectiveness of affective prosodic strategies, for example, but it can also be applied in actual systems.
Yilmazyildiz, S, Latacz, L, Mattheyses, W & Verhelst, W 2010, Expressive Gibberish Speech Synthesis for Affective Human-Computer Interaction. in P Sojka, A Horak, I Kopecek & K Pala (eds), Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD 2010. Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD 2010, Springer, pp. 584-590, Finds and Results from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: A Gender Perspective at the Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm, Sweden, 21/09/09. <http://www.etro.vub.ac.be/Research/DSSP/PUB_FILES/int_conf/tsd-2010-Yilmazyildiz.pdf>
Yilmazyildiz, S., Latacz, L., Mattheyses, W., & Verhelst, W. (2010). Expressive Gibberish Speech Synthesis for Affective Human-Computer Interaction. In P. Sojka, A. Horak, I. Kopecek, & K. Pala (Eds.), Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD 2010 (pp. 584-590). (Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD 2010). Springer. http://www.etro.vub.ac.be/Research/DSSP/PUB_FILES/int_conf/tsd-2010-Yilmazyildiz.pdf
@inproceedings{e6e2b02b7b2f4c3abe54434a4c57dfc7,
title = "Expressive Gibberish Speech Synthesis for Affective Human-Computer Interaction",
abstract = "In this paper we present our study on expressive gibberish speech synthesis as a means for affective communication between computing devices, such as a robot or an avatar, and their users. Gibberish speech consists of vocalizations of meaningless strings of speech sounds and is sometimes used by performing artists to express intended (and often exaggerated) emotions and affect, such as anger and surprise, without actually pronouncing any understandable word. The advantage of gibberish in affective computing lies with the fact that no understandable text has to be pronounced and that only affect is conveyed. This can be used to test the effectiveness of affective prosodic strategies, for example, but it can also be applied in actual systems.",
keywords = "Affective Speech Synthesis, Expressive Speech Synthesis, Gibberish Speech",
author = "Selma Yilmazyildiz and Lukas Latacz and Wesley Mattheyses and Werner Verhelst",
note = "Petr Sojka, Ales Horak, Ivan Kopecek, Karel Pala; Finds and Results from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: A Gender Perspective at the Medelhavsmuseet ; Conference date: 21-09-2009 Through 25-09-2009",
year = "2010",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-642-15759-2",
series = "Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD 2010",
publisher = "Springer",
pages = "584--590",
editor = "Petr Sojka and Ales Horak and Ivan Kopecek and Karel Pala",
booktitle = "Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue TSD 2010",
}