CU VOCAL: corpus-based syllable concatenation for Chinese speech synthesis across domains and dialects

This paper describes CU VOCAL, a Chinese text-to-speech synthesis system that adopts the approach of corpus-based syllable concatenation. We have demonstrated the applicability of the approach primarily for Cantonese, a major dialect of Chinese predominant in Hong Kong, South China and many overseas Chinese communities. This work extends our previous work as described in [1]. Our approach is able to synthesize speech from free-form text, and it can also be optimized for response generation in specific application domains. We have also demonstrated the portability of the approach to Putonghua, the official Chinese dialect, in a domain-optimized setting. Coarticulatory context is expressed in terms of distinctive features. Tonal context is also included. We conducted a series of listening tests using CU VOCAL, which gave favorable performance.