Tootfinder

Uh, this is great, but getting even better/weirder with the mousetrap connotations you get from reading @… 😅
https://mastodon.social/@jimniels/114883243…

"Treating someone like a child" has negative connotations. But doesn't that mean we should start treating children differently?

Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice
Yuto Mandai, Katie Seaborn, Tomoyasu Nakano, Xin Sun, Yijia Wang, Jun Kato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06235

Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice
"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with…

Non-Verbal Vocalisations and their Challenges: Emotion, Privacy, Sparseness, and Real Life
Anton Batliner, Shahin Amiriparian, Bj\"orn W. Schuller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01960

Non-Verbal Vocalisations and their Challenges: Emotion, Privacy, Sparseness, and Real Life
Non-Verbal Vocalisations (NVVs) are short `non-word' utterances without proper linguistic (semantic) meaning but conveying connotations -- be this emotions/affects or other paralinguistic information. We start this contribution with a historic sketch: how they were addressed in psychology and linguistics in the last two centuries, how they were neglected later on, and how they came to the fore with the advent of emotion research. We then give an overview of types of NVVs (formal aspects) and fu…