Synthetic Speech in Therapy of Auditory Hallucinations

摘要

In this article we propose using speech synthesis in the therapy of auditory verbal hallucinations, which are sometimes called "voices". During a therapeutic session a patient converses with an avatar, which is controlled by a therapist. The avatar, based on the XFace model and commercial text-to-speech systems, uses a high quality synthetic voice synchronized with lip movements. A proof-of-concept is demonstrated, as well as the results of preliminary experiments with six patients. The initial results are highly encouraging - all the patients claimed that the therapy helped them, and they also highly assessed the quality of the avatar's speech and its synchronization with the animations.