The ARTICULATE project is an ambitious and interdisciplinary initiative funded by the CHIST-ERA call 2025. Its vision is to revolutionize science education and democratize scientific knowledge beyond academia and English-speaking audiences through the integration of AI with self-regulated learning. The aim is to translate science not just across language but across language style, to create engaging spoken digital experiences. We present an introduction to this project, an overview of the consortium and research approach, and a number of expected impacts.

Auditory interfaces offer a solution to the problem of effective eyes-free mobile interactions. In this article, we investigate the use of multilevel auditory displays to enable eyes-free mobile interaction with indoor location-based information in non-guided audio-augmented environments. A top-level exocentric sonification layer advertises information in a gallery-like space. A secondary interactive layer is used to evaluate three different conditions that varied in the presentation (sequentialversussimultaneous) and spatialisation (non-spatialisedversusegocentric/exocentric spatialisation) of multiple auditory sources. Our findings show that (1) participants spent significantly more time interacting with spatialised displays; (2) using the same design for primary and interactive secondary display (simultaneous exocentric) showed a negative impact on the user experience, an increase in workload and substantially increased participant movement; and (3) the other spatial interactive secondary display designs (simultaneous egocentric, sequential egocentric, and sequential exocentric) showed an increase in time spent stationary but no negative impact on the user experience, suggesting a more exploratory experience. A follow-up qualitative and quantitative analysis of user behaviour support these conclusions. These results provide practical guidelines for designing effective eyes-free interactions for far richer auditory soundscapes.

Automatic Personality Perception is the task of automatically predicting the personality traits people attribute to others. This work presents experiments where such a task is performed by mapping facial appearance into the Big-Five personality traits, namely Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. The experiments are performed over the pictures of the FERET corpus, originally collected for biometrics purposes, for a total of 829 individuals. The results show that it is possible to automatically predict whether a person is perceived to be above or below median with an accuracy close to 70 percent (depending on the trait).

As mobile devices increase in functionality, users perform more tasks when on the move. Spatial audio interfaces offer a solution for eyes-free interaction. However, such interfaces face a number of challenges when supporting multiple and simultaneous tasks, namely: 1) interference amongst multiple audio streams, and 2) the constraints of cognitive load. We present a comparative study of spatial audio techniques evaluated in a divided- and selective-attention task. A podcast was used for high cognitive load (divided-attention) and classical music for low cognitive load (selective-attention), while interacting with an audio menu. Results showed that spatial audio techniques were preferred when cognitive load was kept low, while a baseline technique using an interruptible single audio stream was significantly less preferred. Conversely, when cognitive load was increased the preferences reversed. Thus, given an appropriate task structure, spatial techniques offer a means of designing effective audio interfaces to support eyes-free mobile multitasking.

Thermal feedback is a new area of research in HCI. To date, studies investigating thermal feedback for interaction have focused on virtual reality, abstract uses of thermal output or on use in highly controlled lab settings. This paper is one of the first to look at how environmental factors, in our case clothing, might affect user perception of thermal feedback and therefore usability of thermal feedback. We present a study into how well users perceive hot and cold stimuli on the hand, thigh and waist. Evaluations were carried out with cotton and nylon between the thermal stimulators and the skin. Results showed that the presence of clothing requires higher intensity thermal changes for detection but that these changes are more comfortable than direct stimulation on skin.

We describe a novel dynamic method for collaborative virtual environments designed for mobile devices and evaluated in a mobile context. Participants interacted in pairs remotely and through touch while walking in three different feedback conditions: 1) visual, 2) audio-tactile, 3) spatial audio-tactile. Results showed the visual baseline system provided higher shared awareness, efficiency and a strong learning effect. However, and although very challenging, the eyes-free systems still offered the ability to build joint awareness in remote collaborative environments, particularly the spatial audio one. These results help us better understand the potential of different feedback mechanisms in the design of future mobile collaborative environments.

Audio interfaces are becoming more important due to the increasing functionality of today’s mobile devices. As a result, more complex audio-driven eyes-free interactions are required when mobile. The aim of my work is to evaluate 3D audio techniques used to implement auditory displays that support multitasking and access to context information in interactive mobile environments.

Auditory interfaces offer a solution to the problem of effective eyes-free mobile interactions. However, a problem with audio, as opposed to visual displays, is dealing with multiple simultaneous outputs. Any audio interface needs to consider: 1) simultaneous versus sequential presentation of multiple audio streams, 2) 3D audio techniques to place sounds in different spatial locations versus a single point of presentation, 3) dynamic movement versus fixed locations of audio sources. We present an experiment using a divided-attention task where a continuous podcast and an audio menu compete for attention. A sequential presentation baseline assessed the impact of cognitive load, and as expected, dividing attention had a significant effect on overall performance. However, spatial audio still increased the users' ability to attend to two streams, while dynamic movement of streams led to higher perceived workload. These results will provide guidelines for designers when building eyes-free auditory interfaces for mobile applications.

We describe the results of large scale perception experiments showing improvements in synthesising two distinct kinds of prominence: standard pitch-accent and strong emphatic accents. Previously prominence assignment has been mainly evaluated by computing accuracy on a prominence-labelled test set. By contrast we integrated an automatic pitch-accent classifier into the unit selection target cost and showed that listeners preferred these synthesised sentences. We also describe an improved recording script for collecting emphatic accents, and show that generating emphatic accents leads to further improvements in the fiction genre over incorporating pitch accent only. Finally, we show differences in the effects of prominence between child-directed speech and news and fiction genres. Index Terms: speech synthesis, prosody, prominence, pitch accent, unit selection