Abstract
This paper presents easy-to-use modifications to unit-selection speech-synthesis algorithm with voices built from audiobooks. Audiobooks are a very good source of large and high quality audio data for speech synthesis; however, they usually do not meet basic requirements for standard unit-selection synthesis: “neutral” speech properties with no expressive or spontaneous expressions, stable prosodic patterns, careful pronunciation, and consistent voice style during recording. However, if these conditions are taken into consideration, few modifications can be made to adjust the general unit-selection algorithm to make it more robust for synthesis from such audiobook data. Listening test shows that these adjustments increased perceived speech quality and acceptability against a baseline TTS system. Modifications presented here can also allow to exploit audio data variability to control pitch and tempo of synthesized speech.
The work has been supported by the grant of the University of West Bohemia, project No. SGS-2016-039, and by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. TA01011264.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, neutral speech is meant as news broadcasting style, which is very often used by modern commercial TTS system.
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Vít, J., Matoušek, J. (2016). Unit-Selection Speech Synthesis Adjustments for Audiobook-Based Voices. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9924. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_38
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