Hybrid syllable/triphone speech synthesis

In this paper, the syllable, an alternative phonetic unit to the phone, is researched in the context of speech synthesis. Several approaches to syllable modelling within the statistical approach (using hidden Markov models) to the acoustic unit inventory creation are proposed and evaluated. To be able to synthesize an arbitrary text, the syllable inventories were supplemented with triphones resulting in hybrid syllable/triphone inventories. Listening tests were accomplished both to assess the quality of the resulting synthetic speech produced using the hybrid syllable/triphone inventories and to choose the best approach to syllable modelling. The resulting synthetic speech is highly intelligible and fluent. Although the synthetic speech generated using the baseline triphone inventory was assessed slightly better, the results of the very first experiments with syllable modelling are very promising.