This paper details two perception experiments based on synthetic British English obtained with CART models predicting phone durations in slow speech from normal speed speech. Speech rate and naturalness were assessed by 6 English natives. Synthetic slow speech was rated as both slower and less natural than natural slow speech; however, the insertion of the pauses produced in natural slow speech...

The intelligibility of vocoded speech with various phase spectra was compared to the intelligibility of the original input natural speech. It was found that vocoded speech with true natural phase was the closest to natural speech in intelligibility.

The application of speech recognition and understanding to real-life situations generates new scientific problems. To illustrate this, we give the example of an automatic switchboard system tha[ can be used in a very natural communication style, It is based on a high end speech recognize that ou[puts a word lattice which is subject to fur[her evaluation by a speech understanding and a dialogue ...

In this paper we address two important issues in generating spoken language within a multimedia system: the design of a speech generator to facilitate coordination between media, and extensions to the functionality of a written language generation system to produce natural speech output. We demonstrate how a speech generator can produce information that allows for temporal coordination between ...

This paper aims to explore non-contemporaneous withinspeaker variation of a Japanese male speaker, focusing on the difference between speech styles, viz.. natural speech and read-out speech. Recordings under forensic conditions are mostly of natural speech. A suspect’s recording to be compared are, however, sometimes read-out speech, but not natural speech, in order to obtain the similar phonol...