3/2/2017 ARIA VALUSPA – Ground breaking Virtual Human technology

The way we interact with technology is changing - through mobile devices, Siri -like personal assistants, robotics, gaming, wearable technology and more - and synthetic speech is an integral part of that. Text to speech voices need to not only be good enough to deliver a seamless communication experience through conversational interfaces but also delight the user!

CereProc is working on developing emotional and expressive TTS for the next generation of virtual agents, as part of the ARIA VALUSPA project. The end goal is to ‘create a ground-breaking new framework that will allow easy creation of Artificial Retrieval of Information Assistants (ARIAs) that are capable of holding multi-modal social interactions in challenging and unexpected situations’.

You can read more about CereProc’s contribution in this blog post about expressive speech synthesis and affective information retrieval on the ARIA website .

Last month we celebrated a major milestone in the project - the released of ARIA-Framework 2.0 (that includes CereProc’s emotional TTS). The Framework can be downloaded from GitHub.