The CSTR entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2016

This paper describes the text-to-speech system entered by The Centre for Speech Technology Research into the 2016 Blizzard Challenge. This system is a hybrid synthesis system which uses output from a recurrent neural network to drive a unit selection synthesiser. The annual Blizzard Challenge conducts side-byside testing of a number of speech synthesis systems trained on a common set of speech data. The task of the 2016 Blizzard Challenge is to train on expressively-read children’s storybooks, and to synthesise speech in the same domain. The Challenge therefore presents an opportunity to test the effectiveness of several techniques we have developed when applied to expressive speech data.