Studying Mutual Phonetic Influence with a Web-Based Spoken Dialogue System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel web-based spoken dialogue system that studies mutual phonetic influence between humans and computers, providing real-time tracking and adaptation of speech features to enhance naturalness in interactions.

Contribution

It presents a new end-to-end platform for analyzing and simulating phonetic variation in dialogue, enabling personalized speaking styles in human-computer interactions.

Findings

Behavioral patterns in phonetic influence identified

Real-time visualization of speech feature changes implemented

System demonstrates potential for more natural human-computer dialogue

Abstract

This paper presents a study on mutual speech variation influences in a human-computer setting. The study highlights behavioral patterns in data collected as part of a shadowing experiment, and is performed using a novel end-to-end platform for studying phonetic variation in dialogue. It includes a spoken dialogue system capable of detecting and tracking the state of phonetic features in the user's speech and adapting accordingly. It provides visual and numeric representations of the changes in real time, offering a high degree of customization, and can be used for simulating or reproducing speech variation scenarios. The replicated experiment presented in this paper along with the analysis of the relationship between the human and non-human interlocutors lays the groundwork for a spoken dialogue system with personalized speaking style, which we expect will improve the naturalness and efficiency of human-computer interaction.