创建非裔美国人音色的文本转语音系统：指南、技术挑战与令人惊讶的评估
Creating an African American-Sounding TTS: Guidelines, Technical Challenges,and Surprising Evaluations
AI总结：
本文探讨开发非裔美国人音色TTS系统的指南、技术挑战及评估，发现用户难以正确识别其种族，反映潜在偏见，并确认了声音的代表性。
摘要：
用户界面和机器人技术中AI智能体的表征 predominantly 是白人的，不仅在面部和皮肤特征上，而且在它们使用的合成声音上也是如此。在本文中，我们探讨了在开发一个旨在听起来像受过教育、专业、无地区口音的非裔美国女性的美国英语文本转语音（TTS）系统过程中，我们发现的关于种族表征的一些意外挑战。论文首先展示了与非裔美国IT专业人士进行的焦点小组的结果，其中讨论并收集了创建具有代表性和适当性的TTS系统的指南和挑战，随后讨论了TTS系统开发者面临的一些技术困难。然后，我们描述了两项针对美国英语使用者的研究，在这些研究中，参与者无法将正确的种族归因于非裔美国人的TTS声音，而 overwhelmingly 正确地识别了类似质量的白色TTS系统的种族。与非裔美国IT工人的焦点小组不仅确认了我们构建的非裔美国人声音的代表性，而且还表明，令人惊讶的识别结果可能是由于非非裔美国人无法或潜在的偏见，将受过教育、非方言、专业听起来的声音与非裔美国人联系起来。
英文摘要：
Representations of AI agents in user interfaces and robotics are predominantly White, not only in terms of facial and skin features, but also in the synthetic voices they use. In this paper we explore some unexpected challenges in the representation of race we found in the process of developing an U.S. English Text-to-Speech (TTS) system aimed to sound like an educated, professional, regional accent-free African American woman. The paper starts by presenting the results of focus groups with African American IT professionals where guidelines and challenges for the creation of a representative and appropriate TTS system were discussed and gathered, followed by a discussion about some of the technical difficulties faced by the TTS system developers. We then describe two studies with U.S. English speakers where the participants were not able to attribute the correct race to the African American TTS voice while overwhelmingly correctly recognizing the race of a White TTS system of similar quality. A focus group with African American IT workers not only confirmed the representativeness of the African American voice we built, but also suggested that the surprising recognition results may have been caused by the inability or the latent prejudice from non-African Americans to associate educated, non-vernacular, professionally-sounding voices to African American people.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
