Casual chatter or speaking up? Adjusting articulatory effort in generation of speech and animation for conversational characters
Joakim Gustafson, Éva Székely, Simon Alexandersson, Jonas Beskow · 2023
Embodied conversational agents and social robots need to be able to generate spontaneous behavior in order to be believable in social interactions. We present a system that can generate spontaneous speech with supporting lip movements. The conversational TTS voice is trained on a podcast corpus that has been prosodically tagged (f0, speaking rate and energy) and transcribed (including tokens for breathing, fillers and laughter). We introduce a speech animation algorithm where articulatory effort can be adjusted. The speech animation is driven by time-stamped phonemes obtained from the internal alignment attention map of the TTS system, and we use prominence estimates from the synthesised speech waveform to modulate the lip- and jaw movements accordingly.