Breath and repeat: An attempt at enhancing speech-laugh synthesis quality

In this work, we present a study dedicated to improve the speech-laugh synthesis quality. The impact of two factors is evaluated. The first factor is the addition of breath intake sounds after laughter bursts in speech. The second is the repetition of the word interrupted by laughs in the speech-laugh sentences. Several configurations are evaluated through subjective perceptual tests. We report an improvement of the synthesized speech-laugh naturalness when the breath intake sounds are added. We were unable, though, to make a conclusion concerning a possible positive impact of the repetition of the interrupted words on the speech-laugh synthesis quality.