Six Speaking Chairs - Pullin and Cook

Six speaking chairs is a research project exploring more expressive interactions with text-to-speech technology. Our goal is to bring richer tone of voice into communication aids for people who cannot speak, but in order to catalyse new discussions and directions we are starting with something a little different...

The six speaking chairs are part installation, part user experience prototypes. They are conversation pieces to have discussions around with AAC* users, technologists, designers, therapists and other experts. Each takes the way that a different discipline [phoneticians, sociolinguists, playwrights, musicians...] describes tone of voice and uses this as the basis for an intuitive user interface.

Three of the six chairs have been completed, with three still in production. A comparative study of the conversational effectiveness of each chair will inform and inspire our next steps.

>> dowload a more detailed paper about six speaking chairs, presented at ISAAC 2008.




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	Chair No. 1 - the exclaiming/questioning chair (front), representing current practice in text-to-speech
	Six speaking chairs is a research project exploring more expressive interactions with text-to-speech technology. Our goal is to bring richer tone of voice into communication aids for people who cannot speak, but in order to catalyse new discussions and directions we are starting with something a little different... The six speaking chairs are part installation, part user experience prototypes. They are conversation pieces to have discussions around with AAC* users, technologists, designers, therapists and other experts. Each takes the way that a different discipline [phoneticians, sociolinguists, playwrights, musicians...] describes tone of voice and uses this as the basis for an intuitive user interface. Three of the six chairs have been completed, with three still in production. A comparative study of the conversational effectiveness of each chair will inform and inspire our next steps. >> dowload a more detailed paper about six speaking chairs, presented at ISAAC 2008.