Effects of pitch adaptation in prosody on human-machine verbal communication

Abstract

Abstract A machine which adapts to the optimal speech characteristics of a human speaker would be useful for smooth human-machine verbal communication. This paper focuses on the fundamental period of speech in pitch structure for prosodic adaptation and discusses the relationship between the fundamental period of a speaker's utterance and the fundamental period of the speaker's own preferable listening. From the results of sensory evaluation by paired comparison of varied fundamental periods, it is found that the mean fundamental period is preferred as listening fundamental period, independent of the speaker's utterance fundamental period. In consideration of the previous results of temporal adaptation, it is concluded that the prosodic adaptation in temporal structure, such as the speech activity adaptation, is effective in human-machine verbal communication, while for the adaptation of the fundamental period in pitch structure, it is sufficient that the machine's output fundamental period is set at the mean value.