Phonetics

Phonetics and Friends Christmas Party 2025

Left to right: Ákos Buza, Olcay Türk, Nico Dallmann, Alexandra Schmidt (former member), Moritz Wackerbarth (former member), Petra Wagner, Leonie Schade, Jana Wiechmann, Fritz Seebauer, Susanne Hofmann, Daniel Duran

Not pictured: Farhat Jabeen, Simon Betz 

What We Do:

• Speech synthesis, i.e. the artificial production of speech such as that used in robots, reading devices, computer games or announcement systems.
• Prosody, and in particular aspects of timing and emphasis. How prominently are sounds produced at specific points of an utterance, and when? How is this perceived and modeled?
• Conversational prosody, gesture and nonverbal vocalizations. In this research area, we are interested in various aspects of multimodal communication, such as the synchronization of sounds with facial expressions and gestures or phonetic realisation of disfluent speech and its integration in systems of human-machine interaction.

News

• Simon Betz received a best reviewer award at Interspeech 2026. Congratulations, Simon!

• We had a record number of 6 presentations at Interspeech 2026 in Sydney this year, including an invited survey talk by Farhat Jabeen! Topics include TTS evaluation, phonaesthetics, prosodic prominence perception and voice editing for training speech therapists.

• We proudly hosted SALA 40 together with our colleagues from the CRC1646 A03 project!

• Within the CRC1646 A03 project, we co-hosted an international workshop on "Mismatches in Information Structure, Prosody, and Syntax" at CITEC.

• Petra Wagner and Simon Betz gave a keynote at the Disfluencies in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal in September 2025.