Section: Application Domains

Multimodal Computer Interactions

Speech synthesis has tremendous applications in facilitating communication in a human-machine interaction context to make machines more accessible. For example, it started to be widely common to use acoustic speech synthesis in smartphones to make possible the uttering of all the information. This is valuable in particular in the case of handicap, as for blind people. Audiovisual speech synthesis, when used in an application such as a talking head, i.e., virtual 3D animated face synchronized with acoustic speech, is beneficial in particular for hard-of-hearing individuals. This requires an audiovisual synthesis that is intelligible, both acoustically and visually. A talking head could be an intermediate between two persons communicating remotely when their video information is not available, and can also be used in language learning applications as vocabulary tutoring or pronunciation training tool. Expressive acoustic synthesis is of interest for the reading of a story, such as audiobook, to facilitate the access to literature (for instance for blind people or for illiterate people).