Skip to main content

Tuning Limited Domain Speech Synthesis Using General Text-to-Speech System

  • Conference paper
Book cover Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8655))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

The subject of the present paper is the building of a limited domain speech synthesis system, where longer units, like words and phrases, can naturally be concatenated together. However, instead of building a single-purpose domain-oriented engine working with longer units, we show that a general-purpose TTS system can be used as a good emulation tool to ensure that a real domain-oriented engine will work correctly. Since the current general speech synthesis system embedding unit selection method concatenates short speech units (diphones), the selection algorithm has been modified to pretend the concatenation of words or even the whole phrases, while still concatenating diphones internally. The behaviour of the system is tested on two limited domains and its output is compared to the output of general (unmodified) version of the same TTS system. The results show clear encouragement for the build of the “real” domain-oriented engine.

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), project “New Technologies for Information Society” (NTIS), European Centre of Excellence, CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0090, the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. TA01030476 and SGS-2013-032.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Black, A.W.: Perfect Synthesis for all of the people all of the time. In: IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis, Santa Monica, USA (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Black, A.W., Lenzo, K.A.: Limited Domain Synthesis. In: ICSLP 2000 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Yi, J., Glass, J.: Natural-sounding speech synthesis using variable-length units. In: Proceedings of ICSLP, Sydney, Australia, pp. 1167–1170 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Donovan, R.E., Franz, M., Sorensen, J.S., Roukos, S.: Phrase splicing and variable substitution using the ibm trainable speech synthesis system. In: Proc. of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 1999, pp. 373–376. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Matoušek, J., Romportl, J., Tihelka, D., Tychtl, Z.: Recent Improvements on ARTIC: Czech text-to-speech system. In: INTERSPEECH 2004 – ICSLP, Proc. of the 8th Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, Korea, pp. 1933–1936 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Matoušek, J., Tihelka, D., Romportl, J.: Current state of Czech text-to-speech system ARTIC. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K., et al. (eds.) TSD 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4188, pp. 439–446. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Matoušek, J., Tihelka, D., Romportl, J.: Building of a Speech Corpus Optimised for Unit Selection TTS Synthesis. In: Proc. of 6th Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008, ELRA (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Jůzová, M., Tihelka, D.: Minimum Text Corpus Selection for Limited Domain Speech Synthesis. In: Sojka, P., et al. (eds.) Proc. of Text, Speech and Dialogue (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Švec, J., Šmídl, L.: Prototype of Czech Spoken Dialog System with Mixed Initiative for Railway Information Service. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K., et al. (eds.) TSD 2010. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 6231, pp. 568–575. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Ramportl, J., Tihelka, D.: Exploring Automatic Similarity Measures for Unit Selection Tuning. In: Proc. of Int. Conf. Interspeech 2009, pp. 736–739 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Tihelka, D., Kala, J., Matoušek, J.: Enhancements of Viterbi Search for Fast Unit Selection Synthesis. In: Proc. of Int. Conf. Interspeech 2010, pp. 174–177 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Jůzová, M., Tihelka, D. (2014). Tuning Limited Domain Speech Synthesis Using General Text-to-Speech System. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8655. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10816-2_49

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10816-2_49

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10815-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10816-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics