Borders of "humanness" category
Integrating synthetic voice interfaces into devices is on the rise in numerous settings, from living rooms to classrooms and care-facilities. Despite tremendous technical progress, synthetic voices still lack "humanity," in particular when it comes to prosody (“how” something is spoken, in addition to what is spoken) and conversational elements, such as interjections or non-verbal vocalizations. Because human communication is shaped by such vocal content, it is both crucial and urgent to foresee the consequences of synthetic speech on human lives. To do so, our project aims at quantifying acoustic information associated with human and non-human voices, and discovering the impact of synthetic voices' lack of "humanity" on human cognition. Such a project requires a deep understanding of both the spoken signal and the user; we thus combine expertise from speech, cognition, neuroscience, and computer sciences to holistically and successfully address this challenge. Our results will provide a testbench for understanding human interactions with synthetic voices, thus preparing us for the inevitable changes in human communication that will come with the ubiquity of interactions with non-human devices.
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