Towards Improving the Naturalness of Social Conversations with Dialogue Systems.

We describe an approach to improving the naturalness of a social dialogue system, Talkie, by adding disfluencies and other content-independent enhancements to synthesized conversations. We investigated whether listeners perceive conversations with these improvements as natural (i.e., human-like) as human-human conversations. We also assessed their ability to correctly identify these conversations as between humans or computers. We find that these enhancements can improve the perceived naturalness of conversations for observers "overhearing" the dialogues.