Definition
Over the last decade, speech synthesis, the technology that enables machines to talk to humans, has become so natural-sounding that a naïve listener might assume that he/she is listening to a recording of a live human speaker. Speech synthesis is not new; indeed, it took several decades to arrive where it is today. Originally starting from the idea of using physics-based models of the vocal-tract, it took many years of research to perfect the encapsulation of the acoustic properties of the vocal-tract as a “black box”, using so-called formant synthesizers. Then, with the help of ever more powerful computing technology, it became viable to use snippets of recorded speech directly and glue them together to create new sentences in the form of concatenative synthesizers. Combining this idea with now available methods for fast search, potentially millions of choices are evaluated to find the optimal...
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Schroeter, J. (2009). Voice Sample Synthesis. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_6
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