Allophone-Based Concatenative Speech Synthesis System for Russian

Abstract

Existing concatenative speech synthesis systems developed for various languages use diphones as their main construction units. The report describes the Russian synthesis system based on the use of allophones, that is realizations of Russian phonemes in definite phonetic contexts. In speech synthesis an allophone is a concrete sound which is tolerant to a number of its right and left contexts. The use of allophones gives a number of advantages compared to the use of diphones, but at the same time it sets a number of certain limitations. The report describes the principles of the allophone extraction from natural speech flow, ways of forming synthesized speech, modification of the acoustic parameters.