On the role of communicative structure in read aloud applications for elderly

Abstract

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.