Conversational spontaneous speech synthesis using average voice model

This paper describes conversational spontaneous speech synthesis based on hidden Markov model (HMM). To reduce the amount of data required for model training, we utilize an average-voice-based speech synthesis framework, which has been shown to be effective for synthesizing speech with arbitrary speaker’s voice using a small amount of training data. We examine several kinds of average voice model using readingstyle speech and/or conversation-style speech. We also examine an appropriate utterance unit for conversational speech synthesis. Experimental results show that the proposed two-stage model adaptation method improves the quality of synthetic conversational speech.