In this paper we present an affect editor for speech. The affect editor is a tool that encompasses various editing techniques for expressions in speech. It can be used for both natural and synthesized speech. We present a technique that uses a natural expression in one utterance by a particular speaker to other utterances by the same speaker or by other speakers. Natural new expressions are cre...

A concatenative speech synthesis system increases its potential to generate natural speech if the system uses more short speech segments, since the concatenation variation becomes greater. In this paper, we propose the use of very short speech segments (5 ms, one pitch period of 200 Hz pitch) for concatenative speech synthesis. The proposed method is applied to the speech database CMU ARCTIC, a...

Word and sentence level timing in natural fast speech differs from that at a normal speech rate. However, previous research has shown that making the temporal pattern of artificially time-compressed speech more similar to that of natural fast speech did not improve intelligibility over linear time compression. Furthermore, pilot studies suggested that naturally produced fast speech is more diff...

This paper presents sampling-based speech parameter generation using moment-matching networks for Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based speech synthesis. Although people never produce exactly the same speech even if we try to express the same linguistic and para-linguistic information, typical statistical speech synthesis produces completely the same speech, i.e., there is no inter-utterance variatio...

This paper documents the third in a series of Benchmark Tests for the DARPA Air Travel Information System (ATIS) common task domain. The first results in this series were reported at the June 1990 Speech and Natural Language Workshop [1], and the second at the February 1991 Speech and Natural Language Workshop [2]. The February 1992 Benchmark Tests include: (1) ATIS domain spontaneous speech re...

For many years, speech has been the most natural and efficient means of information exchange for human beings. With the advancement of technology and the prevalence of computer usage, the design and production of speech recognition systems have been considered by researchers. Among this, lip-reading techniques encountered with many challenges for speech recognition, that one of the challenges b...

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian roma...

We describe a new approach for generating Norwegian intonation in text to speech synthesis. The method is based on a phonological representation of utterances. The overall f0 contour of an utterance is synthesised by concatenation of stored f0 contours corresponding to accent units. Candidate accent units are found by searching a lexicon derived from natural speech and selecting the unit that i...

In the last decade there has been an increasing tendency to incorporate language engineering strategies into speech technology. This technique combines linguistic and mathematical information in different applications: machine translation, natural language processing, speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition (ASR). In the field of speech synthesis, this hybrid approach (linguistic and ...