Design and development of spoken dialog systems incorporating speech synthesis of viennese varieties

Abstract

This paper describes our work on the design and development of a spoken dialog system, which uses synthesized speech of various different Viennese varieties. In a previous study we investigated the usefulness of synthesis of varieties. The developed spoken dialog system was especially designed for the different personas that can be realized with multiple varieties. This brings more realistic and fun-to-use spoken dialog systems to the end user and can serve as speech-based user interface for blind users and users with visual impairment. The benefits for this group of users are the increased acceptability and also comprehensibility that comes about when the synthesized speech reflects the user's linguistic and/or social identity. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.