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Synthetic Speech in Therapy of Auditory Hallucinations

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Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10415))

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Abstract

In this article we propose using speech synthesis in the therapy of auditory verbal hallucinations, which are sometimes called “voices”. During a therapeutic session a patient converses with an avatar, which is controlled by a therapist. The avatar, based on the XFace model and commercial text-to-speech systems, uses a high quality synthetic voice synchronized with lip movements. A proof-of-concept is demonstrated, as well as the results of preliminary experiments with six patients. The initial results are highly encouraging – all the patients claimed that the therapy helped them, and they also highly assessed the quality of the avatar’s speech and its synchronization with the animations.

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Correspondence to Artur Janicki .

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Sorokosz, K., Stefaniak, I., Janicki, A. (2017). Synthetic Speech in Therapy of Auditory Hallucinations. In: Ekštein, K., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10415. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64206-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64206-2_10

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