Adaptive Speech Synthesis in a Cognitive Robotic Service Apartment

Authors: Angelika Hönemann, Petra Wagner

Abstract:

The Cognitive Robotic Service Apartment is both a realistic apartment and a laboratory environment in which the one or several user(s) interact with various manifestations of an intelligent agent e.g. a talking head. We expect that across various situational settings in the apartment, different specifications and adaptations of the synthetic voice will become necessary. Some of the dynamic adaptations will depend on physical factors e.g. ambient noise affecting speech intelligibility others on interpersonal factors e.g. familiarity and even others on the manifestation of the artificial agent itself e.g. the agent's voice, perceived gender, age and competence. It is the overall aim of our ongoing project to build a voice for a dynamically speech synthesis adaptation across various typical interaction scenarios and agent manifestations (robot, virtual agent). In the final implementation, the voice adaptation will be realized incrementally, i.e. the adaptation will be effected while talking. The adaptive synthesis module will be extended the existed incremental speech process system InproTK that is part of the cognitive architecture of the apartment. In order to determine an ideal set of adaptive parameters, a series of experiments is currently being planned and carried out. The paper will present our general methodology and describes our first study to find suitable synthesis voices for the virtual agent or humanoid robot used in the Cognitive Robotic Service Apartment.