Laughter is a powerful means of emotion expression which has not yet been used in speech synthesis. The current paper reports
on a pilot study in which differently created types of laughter were combined with synthetic speech in a dialogical situation.
A perception test assessed the effect on perceived social bonding as well as the appropriateness of the laughter. Results
indicate that it is crucial to carefully model the intensity of the laughter, whereas speaker identity and generation method
appear less important.