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A waveform concatenation technique for text-to-speech synthesis

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Abstract

Designing text-to-speech systems capable of producing natural sounding speech segments in different Indian languages is a challenging and ongoing problem. Due to the large number of possible pronunciations in different Indian languages, a number of speech segments are needed to be stored in the speech database while a concatenative speech synthesis technique is used to achieve highly natural speech segments. However, the large speech database size makes it unusable for small hand held devices or human computer interactive systems with limited storage resources. In this paper, we proposed a fraction-based waveform concatenation technique to produce intelligible speech segments from a small footprint speech database. The results of all the experiments performed shows the effectiveness of the proposed technique in producing intelligible speech segments in different Indian languages even with very less storage and computation overhead compared to the existing syllable-based technique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of CSE, Silicon Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

    Soumya Priyadarsini Panda

  2. Department of CS&IT, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

    Ajit Kumar Nayak

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  1. Soumya Priyadarsini Panda
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  2. Ajit Kumar Nayak
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Correspondence to Soumya Priyadarsini Panda.

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Panda, S.P., Nayak, A.K. A waveform concatenation technique for text-to-speech synthesis. Int J Speech Technol 20, 959–976 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-017-9463-8

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