Joint prosody prediction and unit selection for concatenative speech synthesis

In this paper we describe how prosody prediction can be efficiently integrated with the unit selection process in a concatenative speech synthesizer under a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) architecture. WFSTs representing prosody prediction and unit selection can be composed during synthesis, thus effectively expanding the space of possible prosodic targets. We implemented a symbolic prosody prediction module and a unit selection database as the synthesis components of a travel planning system. Results of perceptual experiments show that by combining the steps of prosody prediction and unit selection we are able to achieve improved naturalness of synthetic speech compared to the sequential implementation.