Emotional speech as an effective interface for people with special needs

The paper describes an application concept of an affective communication system for people with disabilities and elderly people, summarizes the universal nature of emotion and its vocal expression, and reports on the work on designing a corpus database of emotional speech for a speech synthesis in the proposed system. Three corpora of emotional speech (joy, anger and sadness) have been designed and tested for the use with CHATR, the concatenated speech synthesis system at ATR. Each text corpus was designed to bring out a speaker's emotion. The result of perceptual experiments was proved to be significant and so was the result of CHATR synthesized speech. This indicates that the subjects successfully identified the emotion types of the synthesized speech from implicit phonetic information and hence this study has proved the validity of using a corpus of emotional speech as a database for the concatenated speech synthesis system.