Paige Tuttösí

Paige Tuttösí, Mantaj Dhillon, Luna Sang et al.

Some speech recognition tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), are approaching or have reached human performance in many reported metrics. Yet, they continue to struggle in complex, real-world, situations, such as with distanced speech. Previous challenges have released datasets to address the issue of distanced ASR, however, the focus remains primarily on distance, specifically relying on multi-microphone array systems. Here we present the B(asic) E(motion) R(andom phrase) S(hou)t(s) (BERSt) dataset. The dataset contains almost 4 hours of English speech from 98 actors with varying regional and non-native accents. The data was collected on smartphones in the actors homes and therefore includes at least 98 different acoustic environments. The data also includes 7 different emotion prompts and both shouted and spoken utterances. The smartphones were places in 19 different positions, including obstructions and being in a different room than the actor. This data is publicly available for use and can be used to evaluate a variety of speech recognition tasks, including: ASR, shout detection, and speech emotion recognition (SER). We provide initial benchmarks for ASR and SER tasks, and find that ASR degrades both with an increase in distance and shout level and shows varied performance depending on the intended emotion. Our results show that the BERSt dataset is challenging for both ASR and SER tasks and continued work is needed to improve the robustness of such systems for more accurate real-world use.

Bermet Burkanova, Payam Jome Yazdian, Chuxuan Zhang et al.

Imagine a humanoid that can safely and creatively dance with a human, adapting to its partner's proficiency, using haptic signaling as a primary form of communication. While today's AI systems excel at text or voice-based interaction with large language models, human communication extends far beyond text-it includes embodied movement, timing, and physical coordination. Modeling coupled interaction between two agents poses a formidable challenge: it is continuous, bidirectionally reactive, and shaped by individual variation. We present CoMPAS3D, the largest and most diverse motion capture dataset of improvised salsa dancing, designed as a challenging testbed for interactive, expressive humanoid AI. The dataset includes 3 hours of leader-follower salsa dances performed by 18 dancers spanning beginner, intermediate, and professional skill levels. For the first time, we provide fine-grained salsa expert annotations, covering over 2,800 move segments, including move types, combinations, execution errors and stylistic elements. We draw analogies between partner dance communication and natural language, evaluating CoMPAS3D on two benchmark tasks for synthetic humans that parallel key problems in spoken language and dialogue processing: leader or follower generation with proficiency levels (speaker or listener synthesis), and duet (conversation) generation. Towards a long-term goal of partner dance with humans, we release the dataset, annotations, and code, along with a multitask SalsaAgent model capable of performing all benchmark tasks, alongside additional baselines to encourage research in socially interactive embodied AI and creative, expressive humanoid motion generation.

Paige Tuttösí, H. Henny Yeung, Yue Wang et al.

We present the first text-to-speech (TTS) system tailored to second language (L2) speakers. We use duration differences between American English tense (longer) and lax (shorter) vowels to create a "clarity mode" for Matcha-TTS. Our perception studies showed that French-L1, English-L2 listeners had fewer (at least 9.15%) transcription errors when using our clarity mode, and found it more encouraging and respectful than overall slowed down speech. Remarkably, listeners were not aware of these effects: despite the decreased word error rate in clarity mode, listeners still believed that slowing all target words was the most intelligible, suggesting that actual intelligibility does not correlate with perceived intelligibility. Additionally, we found that Whisper-ASR did not use the same cues as L2 speakers to differentiate difficult vowels and is not sufficient to assess the intelligibility of TTS systems for these individuals.

Paige Tuttösí, H. Henny Yeung, Yue Wang et al.

Acoustic context effects, where surrounding changes in pitch, rate or timbre influence the perception of a sound, are well documented in speech perception, but how they interact with language background remains unclear. Using a reverse-correlation approach, we systematically varied the pitch and speech rate in phrases around different pairs of vowels for second language (L2) speakers of English (/i/-/I/) and French (/u/-/y/), thus reconstructing, in a data-driven manner, the prosodic profiles that bias their perception. Testing English and French speakers (n=25), we showed that vowel perception is in fact influenced by conflicting effects from the surrounding pitch and speech rate: a congruent proximal effect 0.2s pre-target and a distal contrastive effect up to 1s before; and found that L1 and L2 speakers exhibited strikingly similar prosodic profiles in perception. We provide a novel method to investigate acoustic context effects across stimuli, timescales, and acoustic domain.