Automatic Selection of Synthesis Units from a Large Speech Database

In this paper, a novel method for the selection of synthesis unit is proposed. The monosyllables are adopted as the basic synthesis units. A set of high-quality synthesis units is selected from a large continuous speech database based on four procedures: pitch period detection and smoothing, speech unit filtering, unit selection, and manual examination. Two cost functions are proposed for obtaining the synthesis units, which minimize the interand intra-syllable distortion. The cost functions estimate the parameters including the prosodic features, the LSP frequencies, and types of syllable concatenation. Experimental results showed that a match rate of 48.9% was achieved. It indicates that about half of the "best" synthesis units can be automatically obtained. Also, a replacement rate of 4.8% was obtained.