Abstract
The quality of speech produced by modern TTS systems utilizing the unit selection approach is very high. However, the system demands are enormous. The storage requirements are directly proportional to the size of speech unit inventory from which the units are selected during the synthesis process. This paper presents the analysis and reduction experiments performed on two large speech corpora employed by a unit selection TTS system for the Czech language. A procedure for exclusion of utterances from the default speech corpus based on statistics of the usage of particular speech units was proposed. The exclusion of whole utterances from the corpus was preferred over the exclusion of individual speech units in order to preserve the fundamental feature of the unit selection method – selection of possibly longest sequences of speech units. Experiments were performed for several reduction levels. Resulting synthetic speech was evaluated by a proposed statistics based on the concatenation points density. Moreover, the speech quality was evaluated in listening tests. All reduced versions of TTS system were evaluated as similar or slightly worse than the baseline system.
This work was supported by the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, project No. MPO FR-TI1/518. The access to computing and storage facilities owned by parties and projects contributing to the National Grid Infrastructure MetaCentrum, provided under the program ”Projects of Large Infrastructure for Research, Development, and Innovations” (LM2010005) is highly appreciated.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Dutoit, T.: Corpus-based Speech Synthesis. In: Benesty, H., Sondhi, M., Huang, Y. (eds.) Springer Handbook of Speech Processing, pp. 437–455. Springer, Dordrecht (2008)
Chazan, D., Hoory, R., Kons, Z., Sagi, A., Shechtman, S., Sorin, A.: Small Footprint Concatenative Text-to-Speech Synthesis System using Complex Spectral Envelope Modeling. In: Proc. of Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 2569–2572 (2005)
Strecha, G., Eichner, M., Hoffmann, R.: Line Cepstral Quefrencies and Their Use for Acoustic Inventory Coding. In: Proc. of Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium, pp. 2873–2876 (2007)
Matoušek, J., Tihelka, D., Romportl, J.: Current State of Czech Text-to-Speech System ARTIC. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds.) TSD 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4188, pp. 439–446. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Kominek, J., Black, A.W.: Impact of durational outlier removal from unit selection catalogs. In: Proc. of the 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, USA, pp. 155–160 (2004)
Tihelka, D.: Corpus-based Approach to Unit Selection Speech Unit Inventory Reduction in ARTIC TTS. In: Proc. of 17th Czech-German Workshop on Speech Processing, pp. 160–167. Institute of Photonics and Electronics AS CR, Prague (2007)
Matoušek, J., Tihelka, D., Romportl, J.: Building of a Speech Corpus Optimised for Unit Selection TTS Synthesis. In: Proc. of LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco (2008)
Young, S.: The HTK Book (for HTK version 3.4). Cambridge University, UK (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hanzlíček, Z., Matoušek, J., Tihelka, D. (2013). Experiments on Reducing Footprint of Unit Selection TTS System. In: Habernal, I., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8082. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40585-3_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40585-3_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40584-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40585-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)