Conversational technologies that assist elderly people need to adapt
to common disabilities in old age. Visual, hearing and even more
so cognitive impairments pose serious difficulties for our seniors
to handle a standard conversation with a human. Understanding
a virtual agent may be ever harder. In this case, communicative
strategies are key to adapt the virtual agent to the needs of elderly
users. This paper addresses the role of the communicative structure
for expressive speech prosody, ...
Conversational technologies that assist elderly people need to adapt
to common disabilities in old age. Visual, hearing and even more
so cognitive impairments pose serious difficulties for our seniors
to handle a standard conversation with a human. Understanding
a virtual agent may be ever harder. In this case, communicative
strategies are key to adapt the virtual agent to the needs of elderly
users. This paper addresses the role of the communicative structure
for expressive speech prosody, which is known to be crucial
for better speech comprehension. It reports on efforts to improve
prosody within a text-to-speech system based on one aspect of the
communicative structure, namely thematicity. The work has been
implemented as an application in a social virtual agent, KRISTINA,
which reads aloud news articles upon request for elderly users in
German.
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