This paper presents a novel non-native speech synthesis technique that preserves the individuality of a non-native speaker. Crosslingual speech synthesis based on voice conversion or Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based speech synthesis is a technique to synthesize foreign language speech using a target speaker’s natural speech uttered in his/her mother tongue. Although the technique holds promise t...

This paper provides a new method for automatically generating speech synthesis units. The algorithm, called Closed-Loop Training (CLT), is based on evaluating and reducing the distortion in synthesized speech. It minimizes distortion caused by synthesis process such as prosodic modification in an analytic way. The distortion is measured by calculating the error between synthesized speech units ...

For the purpose of building speech synthesis system that can generate high-quality speech with wide range in prosody and realize fine prosody control, we propose new speech database constructing method. As a speech synthesis method, we select a hybrid system which consists of two part : speech unit selection and prosody modification part by STRAIGHT (vocoder type high quality analysis-synthesis...

In this paper, we report on a comparative user study about the quality of mobile speech synthesis methods. We measured the impact of device class, data rate, synthesis method (diphone vs. non-uniform unit-selection) and lexicon usage on speech quality (word comprehension and several subjective satisfaction metrics). Seven practically relevant speech synthesis implementations and one natural voi...

In concatenative speech synthesis systems, speech models are usually used to represent the speech signal. Recently, the Harmonic plus Noise Model, HNM, has been proposed for concatenative speech synthesis with promising results. One main drawback of HNM is its complexity. In this paper, we review four different methods of reducing the complexity of HNM. These include, straight-forward synthesis...

In this paper, we compare two methods of building a concatenative speech synthesis system from the relatively small, “Blizzard Challenge” speech databases. In the first method we build a system directly from the Blizzard databases using the IBM Concatenetative Speech Synthesis System originally designed for very large speech databases. In the second method, a larger database is used to build th...

This paper presents new steps toward animation of precise articulation. The acquisition of audio-visual corpus for Czech and new method for parameterization of visual speech was designed to obtain exact speech data. The parameterization method is primarily suitable for training a data driven visual speech synthesis systems. The audio-visual corpus includes also specially designed test part. Fur...

Our reasearch goal is to construct a Japanese TTS (Text-to-Speech) system that can output various kinds of prosody. Since such synthetic speech is useful for a practical use, many TTS systems have implemented global prosodic control processing. But fundamentally they're designed to output speech with standard pitch and speech rate. We discuss synthesis method for high quality speech with extrem...

The term "speech synthesis" has been used for diverse technical approaches. In this paper, some of the approaches used to generate synthetic speech in a text-to-speech system are reviewed, and some of the basic motivations for choosing one method over another are discussed. It is important to keep in mind, however, that speech synthesis models are needed not just for speech generation but to he...

The present study aimed to review the instruction of the L2 speech acts in English pragmatics in the Iranian context during the last two decades from 2000 to 2020. To this end, upon the completion of the study search, the retrieved articles were selected and analyzed based on the research domain.  The results of our synthesis from 54 studies carried out on the instruction of the speech act not ...