Soft-computing methods for text-to-speech driven avatars

  • Authors:

  • Mario Malcangi

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy

  • Venue:
  • MMACTEE'09 Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS international conference on Mathematical methods and computational techniques in electrical engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for driving avatars with text-to-speech synthesis that uses pure text as an information source. The goal is to move lips and face muscles on the basis of the phonetic nature of the utterance and the related expression. Several methods came together to define this solution. Rule-based text-to-speech synthesis generates phonetic and expression transcription of the text to be uttered by the avatar. Phonetic transcription is used to train two artificial neural networks, one for text-to-phone transcription and the other for phone-to-viseme mapping. Then two fuzzylogic engines were tuned for smoothed control of lip and face movements.