The research project COMPANIONS aims at developing an advanced embodied conversational agent (ECA). This ECA is used in two scenarios and two languages (English and Czech), and it requires a TTS system being able to generate very natural expressive and emotional speech output. This paper describes application issues of two such systems within the ECA, introduces approaches to expressive speech handling in unit selection methods, and discusses similarities and differences between these systems and approaches.
Index Terms: expressive speech synthesis, TTS, unit selection, embodied conversational agent, dialogue system
Cite as: Romportl, J., Zovato, E., Santos, R., Ircing, P., Gil, J.R., Danieli, M. (2010) Application of expressive TTS synthesis in an advanced ECA system. Proc. 7th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 7), 120-125
@inproceedings{romportl10_ssw,
author={Jan Romportl and Enrico Zovato and Raúl Santos and Pavel Ircing and José Relaño Gil and Morena Danieli},
title={{Application of expressive TTS synthesis in an advanced ECA system}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. 7th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 7)},
pages={120--125}
}