Giving voices to multimodal applications

The use of speech interaction is important and useful in a wide range of applications. It is a natural way of interaction and it is easy to use by people in general. The development of speech enabled applications is a big challenge that increases if several languages are required, a common scenario, for example, in Europe. Tackling this challenge requires the proposal of methods and tools that foster easier deployment of speech features, harnessing developers with versatile means to include speech interaction in their applications. Besides, only a reduced variety of voices are available (sometimes only one per language) which raises problems regarding the fulfillment of user preferences and hinders a deeper exploration regarding voices’ adequacy to specific applications and users.In this article, we present some of our contributions to these different issues: (a) our generic modality that encapsulates the technical details of using speech synthesis; (b) the process followed to create four new voices, including two young adult and two elderly voices; and (c) some initial results exploring user preferences regarding the created voices.The preliminary studies carried out targeted groups including both young and older-adults and addressed: (a) evaluation of the intrinsic properties of each voice; (b) observation of users while using speech enabled interfaces and elicitation of qualitative impressions regarding the chosen voice and the impact of speech interaction on user satisfaction; and (c) ranking of voices according to preference.The collected results, albeit preliminary, yield some evidence of the positive impact speech interaction has on users, at different levels. Additionally, results show interesting differences among the voice preferences expressed by both age groups and genders.