Saying and seeing it with feeling: techniques for synthesizing visible, emotional speech.
Caroline G. Henton, Peter C. Litwinowicz · 1994
We describe attempts to synthesize visible speech in real-time on a Macintosh^TM personal computer, and to enable the user to color the text of the speech to be synthesized emotionally, according to the user's wishes, the representation of the text, or the semantics of the utterance. The animated visible speech will be demonstrated, in real time, using a variety of on-screen agents and faces. The speech synthesizer used is Apple Computer's MacinTalkPro2®, running on a Quadra AV® computer. Introduction Researchers in disciplines as diverse as ethology, psychology, speech therapy, interpersonal communications and human-machine interface design agree that facial expressions enhance communication. Facial expressions convey both emotion (Ekman and Friesen, 1986) and other communicative signals (Chovil, 1991). A multimodal form of interaction with a computer on-screen agent is likely to improve the quality of the dialogue, both in terms of intelligibility and with regard to user-friendline...