Development of a Tool for Assisting Group Conversation by Re-Voicing Supportive Responses

Interactive group conversation is very important for improvement of cognitive function and prevention of dementia. Interactive means that all the participants participate equally and actively into group conversation. How to make group conversation more interactive for all participants is a challenging task. Main purpose of this study is to develop the system that assists group conversation, which is capable of dealing with following things, face detection and recognition, speech certain contents recognition, repetition or re-voice of supportive responses based on the result of speech contents recognition, and sound source localization using less sensory environment. We did dialogue experiments with arbitrary pairs among seven young adults and analyzed 14 dialogue data for calculating correct recognition rate of face and speech certain contents, for synthesizing speech based on the result of recognition, and for calculating sound source. The performance of the developed system was preliminary verified through the experimental results. The developed system can be used as a basis of assisting group conversation.