ERIC Number: EJ1228589
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-1365-893X
EISSN: N/A
Humanising Text-to-Speech through Emotional Expression in Online Courses
Hillaire, Garron; Iniesto, Francisco; Rienties, Bart
Journal of Interactive Media in Education, v2019 n1 Article 12 2019
This paper outlines an innovative approach to evaluating the emotional content of three online courses using the affective computing approach of prosody detection on two different text-to-speech (TTS) voices in conjunction with human raters judging the emotional content of the text. This work intends to establish the potential variation on the emotional delivery of online educational resources through the use of a synthetic voice, which automatically articulates text into audio. Preliminary results from this pilot research suggest that about one out of every three sentences (35%) in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) contained emotional text and two existing assistive technology voices had poor emotional alignment when reading this text. Synthetic voices were more likely to be overly negative when considering their expression as compared to the emotional content of the text they are reading, which was most frequently neutral. We also analysed a synthetic voice for which we configured the emotional expression to align with course text, which showed promising improvements.
Descriptors: Online Courses, Emotional Response, Educational Technology, Technology Uses in Education, Suprasegmentals, Assistive Technology, Large Group Instruction, Higher Education, Sentences, Program Effectiveness
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. e-mail: jime@open.ac.uk; Web site: http://jime.open.ac.uk
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A

Peer reviewed
