Emotion in user interface, voice interaction system

An approach towards a personalized voice-emotion user interface regardless of the speaker´s age, sex or language is presented. An extensive set of carefully chosen utterances provided a speech database for investing acoustic similarities among eight emotional states: (unemotional) neutral, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprised, stressed/troubled and scared. Based on those results, a voice interaction system (VIS) capable of sensing the user´s emotional message was developed. In efforts to detect emotions, several primary parameters from human speech were analyzed: pitch, formants, tempo (rhythm) and power of human voice. First the individual basic speaker´s voice characteristics were extracted (pitch or/and formants in neutral speech, normal speech rate, neutral speech power) and based on those parameters the emotional message of the subject´s utterance was successfully extracted. The VIS interacts with the user while changing its response according to the user´s utterances