Filled pauses in speech synthesis: towards conversational speech

Authors:
Jordi Adell;Antonio Bonafonte;David Escudero
Affiliations:
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
Venue:
TSD'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Text, speech and dialogue
Year:
2007

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Speech Communication

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Abstract

Speech synthesis techniques have already reached a high level of naturalness. However, they are often evaluated on text reading tasks. New applications will request for conversational speech instead and disfluencies are crucial in such a style. The present paper presents a system to predict filled pauses and synthesise them. Objective results show that they can be inserted with 96% precision and 58% recall. Perceptual results even shown that its insertion increases naturalness of synthetic speech.