This paper presents part of the data collection efforts undergone within the projectCOMPANIONS whose aim is to develop a set of dialogue systems that will be ableto act as an artificial "companions"' for human users. One of these systems, being developed in Czech lang...

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...

In order to improve speech naturalness of a unit selection TTS system it is necessary to annotate prosodic phrase boundaries in the whole source corpus, which is extremely difficult to achieve manually. It is thus usefull to employ a machine classifier. This paper discusses su...

Objective annotation of prosodic phrases in a corpus for a text-to-speech system is an important issue due to its influence on the naturalness of synthesised speech. The paper discusses drawbacks of common ways of prosodic phrase annotation and proposes a concept of prosodic phrase...

The article discusses differences between a priori and a posteriori phrasing and their importance in the task of automatic prosodic phrasing in text-to-speech systems. On several examples it illustrates shortcomings of common evaluation of a priori phrasing performance using a posteriori phr...

It is natural to dream Artificial Dreams. Are dreams of Artificial Intelligence artificial, or natural? What is the difference between artificial and natural? This difference is given by language and by what can be grasped with words. Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) cannot create any...

The aim of this article is to analyse in historical context the foundations of contemporary cybernetics and to off er such a defi nition of cybernetics that corresponds both with cybernetics’ original roots as well as its actual institutionalised research ...

The paper discusses a hypothesis relating high quality text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis in spoken dialogue systems with the concept of “uncanny valley”. It introduces a “Wizard-of-Oz” experiment with 30 volunteers engaged in conversations with two synthetic voices of different naturalness. The resu...

The main idea of a priori machine learning is to apply a machine learning method on a machine learning problem itself.We call it "a priori" because the processed data set does not originate from any measurement or other observation.Machine learning which deals with any&#x...

This paper describes a preparation of the first large Czech prosodic database which should be useful both in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. In the area of ASR we intend to use it for an automatic punctuation annotation, in the area of&#x...

This paper presents recent improvements on ARTIC - the modern Czech corpus-based text-to-speech system. As a statistical approach (using hidden Markov models) was applied to create an acoustic unit inventory, several improvements concerning acoustic unit modelling, clustering and segmentation have...

This paper gives a survey of the current state of ARTIC -- the modern Czech concatenative corpus-based text-to-speech system. All stages of the system design are described in the paper, including the acoustic unit inventory building process, text processing and speech production issues....

This paper proposes a way of preparing and recording a speech corpus for unit selection text-to-speech speech synthesis driven by symbolic prosody. The research is focused on a phonetically and prosodically rich sentence selection algorithm. Symbolic description on a deep prosody level ...

The paper gives a brief summarisation of preparation and recording of a phonetically and prosodically rich speech corpus for Czech unit selection text-to-speech synthesis. Special attention is paid to the process of two-phase orthographic annotations of recorded sentences with regard to thei...

This paper deals with an HMM-based automatic phonetic segmentation (APS) system and proposes to increase its performance by employing a pitch-synchronous (PS) coding scheme. Such a coding scheme uses different frames of speech throughout voiced and unvoiced speech regions and enables thus&#x...

The paper deals with the process of designing a phonetically and prosodically rich speech corpus for unit selection speech synthesis. The attention is given mainly to the recording and verification stage of the process. In order to ensure as high quality and consistency of the...

ARTIC (Artificial Talker in Czech) is a corpus-based text-to-speech (TTS) system that enables to synthesise an arbitrary text, mainly for the Czech language. Basically, two versions of ARTIC are available - a single unit instance system (also known as fixed-inventory synthesis) with the...

Our paper introduces implementation details of the application that serves as an audiovisual interface to the automatic dialogue system. It comprises a state-of-the-art large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine and a TTS system coupled with an embodied avatar that is able to ...