Enhancing Synthetic Speech with Filled Pauses

Filled pauses are generally seen as disfluency. Showing that they can play a positive role in computer generated speech is the purpose of this paper. Details about the causes, variation in pronunciation and syntactic location are acquired through a corpus analysis. This knowledge is then used in an experiment conducted to test positive effects of filled pauses in computer generated speech on listeners. The results show they can influence how well a listener remembers what is said after the filled pause as well as the perceived friendliness and honesty of the speaker and the naturalness of the utterance. This research hopes to contribute to the integration of filled pauses into speech enabled applications.