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The Relationship Between Pauses and Emphasis: Implications for Charismatic Speech Synthesis

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Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14013))

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Abstract

Animated voice is engaging, memorable, and entertaining. It is also an important aspect of charismatic behavior. For animated voices, the variations in speed, intensity, and intonation play a role in the perception of charisma. Changes in speed give rise to pauses. And speakers, especially charismatic ones, often use the silence created by pauses to contrast with the emphasis to follow, such as the words spoken with high intensity. How can we realize such behaviors in a virtual character? In this paper, we discuss our work toward the synthesis of charismatic speeches. We collected voice recordings of a tutorial on the human circulatory system in both charismatic and non-charismatic voices using actors from a crowd-sourcing platform. Those recordings were then annotated for occurrence of emphasis. In this paper, we present the analysis of the pauses and emphasis of charismatic and non-charismatic voice recordings, and discuss how they relate to each other and how such findings can inform the synthesis of charismatic speeches for virtual characters.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant #1816966. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

    Ning Wang & Chirag Merchant

  2. Amazon, Bellevue, USA

    Abhilash Karpurapu

  3. Samsung Research, America, Mountain View, USA

    Aditya Jajodia

Authors
  1. Ning Wang
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  2. Abhilash Karpurapu
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  3. Aditya Jajodia
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  4. Chirag Merchant
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ning Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Open University of Japan, Chiba, Japan

    Masaaki Kurosu

  2. Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Ayako Hashizume

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Wang, N., Karpurapu, A., Jajodia, A., Merchant, C. (2023). The Relationship Between Pauses and Emphasis: Implications for Charismatic Speech Synthesis. In: Kurosu, M., Hashizume, A. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14013. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35602-5_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35602-5_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-35602-5

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