Title
Integrated Speech and Gesture Synthesis
Abstract
ABSTRACT Text-to-speech and co-speech gesture synthesis have until now been treated as separate areas by two different research communities, and applications merely stack the two technologies using a simple system-level pipeline. This can lead to modeling inefficiencies and may introduce inconsistencies that limit the achievable naturalness. We propose to instead synthesize the two modalities in a single model, a new problem we call integrated speech and gesture synthesis (ISG). We also propose a set of models modified from state-of-the-art neural speech-synthesis engines to achieve this goal. We evaluate the models in three carefully-designed user studies, two of which evaluate the synthesized speech and gesture in isolation, plus a combined study that evaluates the models like they will be used in real-world applications – speech and gesture presented together. The results show that participants rate one of the proposed integrated synthesis models as being as good as the state-of-the-art pipeline system we compare against, in all three tests. The model is able to achieve this with faster synthesis time and greatly reduced parameter count compared to the pipeline system, illustrating some of the potential benefits of treating speech and gesture synthesis together as a single, unified problem.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3462244.3479914
ICMI-MLMI
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Siyang Wang100.34
Simon Alexanderson200.34
Joakim Gustafson339258.37
Jonas Beskow466896.64
Gustav Eje Henter53711.40
Éva Székely6194.96