Adding personality to neutral speech synthesis voices

A synthetic voice personifies the system using it. Previous work has shown that using sub-corpora with different voice qualities (e.g. tense and lax) can be used to modify the perceived personality of a voice as well as adding expressive and emotional functionality. In this work we explore the use of LPC source/filter decomposition together with modification of the residual to artificially add voice quality sub-corpora to a voice without recording bespoke data. We evaluate this artificially enhanced voice against a baseline unit selection voice with pre-recorded sub-corpora. Although artificial modification impacts naturalness, it has the advantage of adding emotional range to voices where none was recorded in the source data, deals with data sparsity issues caused by sub-corpora, and results in significant effects in terms of perceived emotion

Patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) have a circulating inducer of interferon-alpha (IFN-α) production acting on leucocytes resembling immature dendritic cells

Patients with active SLE often have an ongoing production of IFN-α. We therefore searched for an endogenous IFN-α-inducing factor (IIF) in SLE patients and found that their sera frequently induced production of IFN-α in cultures of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from healthy blood donors, especially when the PBMC were costimulated with the cytokines IFN-α2b and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF). The phenotype of the IFN-α-producing cells (IPC) as determined by flow cytometry corresponded to that of the natural IPC, resembling immature dendritic cells. The IIF activity in SLE sera was sometimes as high as that of a virus and was present especially in patients with active disease and with measurable IFN-α levels in serum. The IIF had an apparent molecular weight of 300–1000 kD and appeared to consist of both immunoglobulin and DNA, possibly being immune complexes. This endogenous IFN-α inducer may be of pathogenic significance, since a reported occasional adverse effect of IFN-α therapy in patients with non-autoimmune disorders is development of anti-dsDNA antibodies and SLE