Agenda

10:00-11:00 - Machine Processing of Dialogue States; Speculations on Conversational Entropy. Nick Campbell, Speech Processing Lab, Trinity College Dublin
This talk will describe our approach to conversational speech synthesis, illustrated with examples from the Herme dialogues. Herme was a small device that initiated conversations with passers-by in the Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin and managed to engage the majority in short conversations lasting up to about three minutes. Experience from that data collection and analyses of human-human conversational interactions has led us to propose a theory of Conversational Entropy wherein tight couplings become looser through time as topics decay and are refreshed by topic changes and conversational restarts. Laughter is a particular cue to this decay mechanism and might provide sufficient information for machines to intrude into human conversations without causing particular offense.

11:00-12:00 - Parametric vocoding. Phil Garner, IDIAP Research Institute
By contrast to unit selection based TTS approaches, statistical approaches tend to require a parametric vocoder. In turn, the vocoder has a significant effect on the resulting speech quality. I'll say some things about parametric vocoders in general, the source filter model, and pitch tracking. I'll discuss some experiences of trying to write a parametric vocoder, especially the excitation signal.

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