Abstract
Robot utterances generally sound monotonous, unnatural, and unfriendly because their Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems are not optimized for communication but for text-reading. Here we present a non-monologue speech synthesis for robots. We collected a speech corpus in a non-monologue style in which two professional voice talents read scripted dialogues. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) were then trained with the corpus and used for speech synthesis. We conducted experiments in which the proposed method was evaluated by 24 subjects in three scenarios: text-reading, dialogue, and domestic service robot (DSR) scenarios. In the DSR scenario, we used a physical robot and compared our proposed method with a baseline method using the standard Mean Opinion Score (MOS) criterion. Our experimental results showed that our proposed method's performance was (1) at the same level as the baseline method in the text-reading scenario and (2) exceeded it in the DSR scenario. We deployed our proposed system as a cloud-based speech synthesis service so that it can be used without any cost.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 6907168 |
Pages (from-to) | 2237-2242 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2014 Sep 22 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2014 - Hong Kong, China Duration: 2014 May 31 → 2014 Jun 7 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Artificial Intelligence
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering