Developing voices for advanced agent applications

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• Andy Breen, Nuance
• Wednesday 10 December 2014, 14:00-15:00
• Gisbert Kapp, N123.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Philip Weber.

Text-to-Speech has traditionally been viewed as a “black box” component, where standard “portfolio” voices are typically offered with a professional but “neutral” speaking style. Recent advances in conversational agent applications have changed people’s expectations of how a computer voice should sound and interact. Suddenly, it’s much more important for the TTS system to present a persona which matched the goals of the application. Such systems demanded a more flamboyant, upbeat and expressive voice. The “black box” approach is no longer sufficient; voices for high-end conversational agents are being explicitly “designed” to meet the needs of such applications. These voices are both expressive and light, and a complete contrast to the more conservative voices available for traditional markets. This talk will describe how Nuance is addressing this new and challenging market.

This talk is part of the Speech Recognition by Synthesis Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Gisbert Kapp, N123
• Speech Recognition by Synthesis Seminars

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