> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversations using these disfluencies sound more familiar and natural.
This part stuck out to me during the Google I/O demo, as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.
This part stuck out to me during the Google I/O demo, as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.