STUDIES: Corpus of Japanese Empathetic Dialogue Speech Towards Friendly Voice Agent
This addresses the need for more natural voice agents in human-computer interaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing empathetic dialogue concepts.
The researchers tackled the problem of developing a voice agent that speaks in a friendly manner by creating STUDIES, a Japanese speech corpus for empathetic dialogue, and found that using interlocutor's emotion labels and conversational context embeddings produced speech with the same naturalness as using the agent's emotion labels in a text-to-speech experiment.
We present STUDIES, a new speech corpus for developing a voice agent that can speak in a friendly manner. Humans naturally control their speech prosody to empathize with each other. By incorporating this "empathetic dialogue" behavior into a spoken dialogue system, we can develop a voice agent that can respond to a user more naturally. We designed the STUDIES corpus to include a speaker who speaks with empathy for the interlocutor's emotion explicitly. We describe our methodology to construct an empathetic dialogue speech corpus and report the analysis results of the STUDIES corpus. We conducted a text-to-speech experiment to initially investigate how we can develop more natural voice agent that can tune its speaking style corresponding to the interlocutor's emotion. The results show that the use of interlocutor's emotion label and conversational context embedding can produce speech with the same degree of naturalness as that synthesized by using the agent's emotion label. Our project page of the STUDIES corpus is http://sython.org/Corpus/STUDIES.