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The new system will be able to handle phrases like "um", "er" and "shh" and as Andy Aaron, from the IBM's Thomas J Watson research group speech team, said: "These sounds can be incredibly subtle, even unnoticeable, but have a profound psychological effect. It can be extremely reassuring to have a more attentive-sounding voice"
"Generating paralinguistic phenomena via markup in text-to-speech syntheses", as thin new technology have been named was patented recently and will be used in telephone helpline systems, satellite navigation systems and cameras or other gadgets.
New software will even be able to react to a situation, giving instructions such as "shh" or similar when realize they are being interrupted or coughing to gain attention. The system will also be able to "learn" and add expressions at the correct point in a sentence.
On the first look it might be funny to communicate with machines in such manner but for most of everyday users this approach can be more appealing that usual generated voice with no emotions.
Posted February 2nd, 2009 by tamburix
