Synthesizing fast speech by implementing multi-phone units in unit selection speech synthesis

This paper presents a new approach to synthesizing fast speech in unit selection synthesis. After recording two inventories one at normal and one at fast speech rate articulated as accurately as possible speech was synthesized from both corpora independently. Since fast speech differs from normal rate speech in terms of acoustic characteristics, the concept of multi-phone (phoxsy) units proposed by Breuer and Abresch [1] was explored for synthetic speech generated from both speaking rate inventories. A perceptual evaluation showed that phoxsy units enhanced the intelligibility especially for fast synthetic speech significantly.