[iva] CfP: Workshop on "Designing Speech Synthesis for Intelligent Virtual Agents", held at ACM IVA 2019

Matthew Aylett matthewaylett at gmail.com
Mon Mar 18 13:04:14 CET 2019


*Please repost on appropriate lists*
*Apologies for cross-posting*

In this workshop we will look at the elements in an artificial voice that
support an embodied (either digital or tangible) and dis-embodied form of
an intelligent virtual agent (IVA). In this context the agent can be seen
to perform, or act a role, where naturalness of the voice may be
subservient to appropriateness, and communicating the character of the
agent can be as important as the information it presents. We will introduce
the current ways a voice can be made to have character, how this can be
designed to fit a specific agent, and how such a voice can be effectively
deployed.

The intended audience is academics and industry researchers who are tired
of seeing there carefully created conversational agents spoilt by
inappropriate speech synthesis voices, and who want to lead the way in
which speech synthesis takes into account the design requirements of IVAs.
The workshop is not primarily for speech technologists (although they are
of course welcome) but rather the engineers and scientists exploring the
use of IVAs, and are curious to see how modern speech synthesis can
dramatically alter the way such agents are perceived and used.

Attending
Attendees are encouraged to also attend the main conference but this is not
a requirement. We request those interested to email matthewa at cereproc.com
with the following information

1. 100-200 word biography and main motivation for attending.

2. Sketch of an actual or imagined embodied agent that intends to use
speech to converse or present dynamic content. The sketch could include
pictures, example content and design motivations and could vary from well
specified to speculative, from ground breaking to well understood domains.
It could be a couple of pages to a paragraph. The pre-designs will be used
to help the organizers select and formulate a design challenge of interest
to the attendees.

Five of the submissions will be chosen for a short 7 minute + 3 minute
question presentation at the workshop. Please indicate if you would like to
be considered for this. The submissions chosen will aim to give a varied
and proactive view of potential use cases and speech interface designs.

For more information see:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/matthewa/speechIVA2019wshop

Dr Matthew Aylett
CSO CereProc Ltd.
Honorary Fellow, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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