Real-time Visual Prosody for Interactive Virtual Agents

International audience<p>Speakers accompany their speech with incessant, subtle headmovements. It is important to implement such &quot;visual prosody&quot; in virtual agents, not only to make their behavior more natural, but also because it has been shown to help listeners understand speech. We contribute a visual prosody model for interactive virtual agents that shall be capableof having live, non-scripted interactions with humans and thus have to use Text-To-Speech rather than recorded speech. We present our method for creating visual prosody online from continuous TTS output, and we report results from three crowdsourcing experiments carried out to seeif and to what extent it can help in enhancing the interaction experience with an agent.</p

Personality computing: New frontiers in personality assessment

Phan LV, Rauthmann J. Personality computing: New frontiers in personality assessment. Social and Personality Psychology Compass . 2021: e12624.Personality Computing (PC) is a burgeoning field at the intersection of personality and computer science that seeks to extract personality-relevant information (e.g., on Big Five trait levels) from sensor-assessed information (e.g., written texts, digital footprints, smartphone usage, non-verbal behavior, speech patterns, game-play, etc.). Such sensor-based personality assessment promises novel and often technologically sophisticated ways to unobtrusively measure individual differences in a highly precise, granular, and faking-resistant manner. We review the different conceptual underpinnings of PC; survey how well different types of sensors can capture different types of personality-relevant information; discuss the evaluation of PC performance and psychometric issues (reliability and validity) of sensor-derived scores as well as ethical, legal, and societal implications; and highlight how modern personality and computer science can be married more effectively to provide practically useful personality assessment. Together, this review aims to introduce readers to the opportunities, challenges, pitfalls, and implications of PC