ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Evaluating synthesised prosody in simulations of an automated telephone enquiry service

Jill House, Catriona MacDermid, Scott McGlashan, Andrew Simpson, Nick Youd

Dialogue material has been collected using bionic Wizard-of-Oz simulations of an automated voice-driven dialogue system; system turns, using rule-based speech synthesis, were systematically varied for both text and prosody. In a separate pilot experiment, subjects evaluated the system turns on a number of parameters. While they did not always clearly differentiate between the different conditions, they seemed to associate the "enhanced" prosody, preferred in an earlier laboratory experiment, with a more likeable personality.

Keywords: prosody, synthesis, dialogue, evaluation, simulation