Evaluating a virtual speech cuer

Abstract

This paper presents the virtual speech cuer built in the context of the ARTUS project aiming at watermarking hand and face gestures of a virtual animated agent in a broadcasted audiovisual sequence. For deaf televiewers that master cued speech, the animated agent can be then superimposed - on demand and at the reception - on the original broadcast as an alternative to subtitling. The paper presents the multimodal text-to-speech synthesis system and the first evaluation performed by deaf users