Speaker: Laura Mayfield Tomokiyo, Cepstral, LLC.
Title: Speaking Globally: Building the Voices of the World
Abstract:
Intercultural communication between humans is a complicated thing. Not
only do speakers have to master grammar and pronunciation well enough
to make themselves understood, they must also find the most
appropriate way to say it.  Is the same true for synthetic speech?  As
machines are called upon to speak in all languages, the industry must
meet this need in a culturally sensitive way.  Cepstral would like
highlight some of the interesting challenges that we have seen arise
in the creation of synthetic voices.

Our work in voice development for languages such as spoken Arabic,
Thai, and Pashto has uncovered some important challenges.  Gender
roles, dialect community relationships, and speaking style can greatly
affect how listeners perceive synthetic speech.  Voice models can be
extraordinarily difficult to find; the very naturalness of the
synthetic voice may cause the speaker to worry about retribution if
his voice is recognized.  Although sociolinguistic concerns do play a
role in development of voices for high-density languages such as
English, the lack of linguistic resources to build the voice, and of
exposure to speech technology on the part of the listener, can mean
that cultural issues play a far more important role on acceptability
of synthetic speech for most of the languages of the world.

Speaker Bio:
Laura Mayfield Tomokiyo
Cepstral, LLC

Laura received her PhD in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon
in 2001.  As a graduate student, she worked in many areas of
speech-to-speech translation.  Her doctoral research explored
adaptation to non-native speech in Speech Recognition. Laura holds an
MS from Carnegie Mellon and an SB from MIT.

At Cepstral, Laura directs language development for expansion to new
languages as well as enhancement of existing languages.  Her current
focus of research is multilingual and multidialectal resource 
development and synthesis.