SpeakEasy: Enhancing Text-to-Speech Interactions for Expressive Content Creation
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3706598.3714263.pdf
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2.97 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
80a60764376899fda1b333b313621abd
Author(s)
Brade, Stephen
Anderson, Sam
Kumar, Rithesh
Jin, Zeyu
Truong, Anh
Date Issued
April 25, 2025
Publisher
ACM|CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Citation
Stephen Brade, Sam Anderson, Rithesh Kumar, Zeyu Jin, and Anh Truong. 2025. SpeakEasy: Enhancing Text-to-Speech Interactions for Expressive Content Creation. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 756, 1–19.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Novice content creators often invest significant time recording expressive speech for social media videos. While recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) technology can generate highly realistic speech in various languages and accents, many struggle with unintuitive or overly granular TTS interfaces. We propose simplifying TTS generation by allowing users to specify high-level context alongside their script. Our Wizard-of-Oz system, SpeakEasy, leverages user-provided context to inform and influence TTS output, enabling iterative refinement with high-level feedback. This approach was informed by two 8-subject formative studies: one examining content creators’ experiences with TTS, and the other drawing on effective strategies from voice actors. Our evaluation shows that participants using SpeakEasy were more successful in generating performances matching their personal standards, without requiring significantly more effort than leading industry interfaces.
Description
CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714263
