Open-ended, Extensible System Utterances Are Preferred, Even If They Require Filled Pauses

In many environments (e. g. sports commentary), situations incrementally unfold over time and often the future appearance of a relevant event can be predicted, but not in all its details or precise timing. We have built a simulation framework that uses our incremental speech synthesis component to assemble in a timely manner complex commentary utterances. In our evaluation, the resulting output is preferred over that from a baseline system that uses a simpler commenting strategy. Even in cases where the incremental system overcommits temporally and requires a filled pause to wait for the upcoming event, the system is preferred over the baseline.