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Citation

Tihelka, D. : Symbolic prosody driven unit selection for highly natural synthetic speech . Interspeech 2005 — Eurospeech, proceedings of 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, p. 2525-2528, ISCA, Bonn, 2005.

Abstract

In the effort to obtain synthetic speech with the quality near to natural, the unit selection approach has become very important. To increase the naturalness of our native TTS system ARTIC we employed the specific version of the approach. It is driven by the high-level symbolic prosody description, defined according to the phenomena of prosodic synonymy and homonymy. The concrete prosody of a synthesized phrase is not explicitly set here, but emerges on the basis of the target and concatenation costs. Although this is our first treatment requiring some simplification, and for the synonymy/homonymy phenomena only the basics are defined, the first results have already shown that there is a significant shift towards high quality. Listening tests comparing speech from single-instance version to selection-based version of ARTIC showed clear preference of the selection-based version. In addition, the level of naturalness was on average assessed as "close to natural".

Detail of publication

Title: Symbolic prosody driven unit selection for highly natural synthetic speech
Author: Tihelka, D.
Language: English
Date of publication: 4 Sep 2005
Year: 2005
Type of publication: Papers in proceedings of reviewed conferences
Book title: Interspeech 2005 — Eurospeech, proceedings of 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology
Page: 2525 - 2528
Publisher: ISCA
Address: Bonn
Date: 4 Sep 2005 - 8 Sep 2005
/ 2008-05-19 15:30:24 /

Keywords

unit selection, symbolic prosody, synthetic speech naturalness, prosodic synonymy, prosodic homonymy

BibTeX

@INPROCEEDINGS{TihelkaD_2005_Symbolicprosody,
 author = {Tihelka, D.},
 title = {Symbolic prosody driven unit selection for highly natural synthetic speech},
 year = {2005},
 publisher = {ISCA},
 address = {Bonn},
 pages = {2525-2528},
 booktitle = {Interspeech 2005 -- Eurospeech, proceedings of 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology},
 url = {http://www.kky.zcu.cz/en/publications/TihelkaD_2005_Symbolicprosody},
}