EM-HTS: real-time HMM-based Malay emotional speech synthesis

This research aims at developing a real-time HMM-based Malay emotional speech synthesis (EM-HTS) that has the ability to synthesize any form of text input in four different expression which are neutral, anger, sadness and happiness. The quality of the emotional speech synthesis was improved by using Neutral to Angry, Sad, and Happy (NASH) duration generator, which uses context-dependent duration generation method to improve the duration information to the label files of target emotions for training purpose. We conducted three forms of evaluations to determine the accuracy, intelligibility and naturalness of the speech generated by EM-HTS. All the three tests show that the adopted method (NASH) gives a better reproduction of prosody compared to conventional method using the same training speech data.