The Value of a Virtual Assistant to Improve Engagement in Computerized Cognitive Training at Home: Exploratory Study.

Background: Impaired cognitive function is observed in many pathologies, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease. At present, the pharmaceutical treatments available to counter cognitive decline have only modest effects, with significant side effects. A nonpharmacological treatment that has received considerable attention is computerized cognitive training (CCT), which aims to maintain or improve cognitive functioning through repeated practice in standardized exercises.

A Generative Audio-Visual Prosodic Model for Virtual Actors.

An important problem in computer animation of virtual characters is the expression of complex mental states during conversation using the coordinated prosody of voice, rhythm, facial expressions, and head and gaze motion. In this work, the authors propose an expressive conversion method for generating natural speech and facial animation in a variety of recognizable attitudes, using neutral speech and animation as input. Their method works by automatically learning prototypical prosodic contours at the sentence level from an original dataset of dramatic attitudes.

Analysis and synthesis of the three-dimensional movements of the head, face, and hand of a speaker using cued speech.

In this paper we present efforts for characterizing the three dimensional (3-D) movements of the right hand and the face of a French female speaker during the audiovisual production of cued speech. The 3-D trajectories of 50 hand and 63 facial flesh points during the production of 238 utterances were analyzed. These utterances were carefully designed to cover all possible diphones of the French language.

A model of acoustic interspeaker variability based on the concept of formant-cavity affiliation.

A method is proposed to model the interspeaker variability of formant patterns for oral vowels. It is assumed that this variability originates in the differences existing among speakers in the respective lengths of their front and back vocal-tract cavities. In order to characterize, from the spectral description of the acoustic speech signal, these vocal-tract differences between speakers, each formant is interpreted, according to the concept of formant-cavity affiliation, as a resonance of a specific vocal-tract cavity.