Acoustic Modeling of Speaking Styles and Emotional Expressions in HMM-Based Speech Synthesis
IEICE - Transactions on Information and Systems
Details of the Nitech HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System for the Blizzard Challenge 2005
IEICE - Transactions on Information and Systems
Review: Statistical parametric speech synthesis
Speech Communication
Recognition of hesitations in spontaneous speech
ICASSP'92 Proceedings of the 1992 IEEE international conference on Acoustics, speech and signal processing - Volume 1
Neurodynamical top-down processing during auditory attention
ICONIP'12 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Neural Information Processing - Volume Part II
Hi-index | 0.01 |
Spontaneous conversational speech has many characteristics that are currently not modelled well by HMM-based speech synthesis and in order to build synthetic voices that can give an impression of someone partaking in a conversation, we need to utilise data that exhibits more of the speech phenomena associated with conversations than the more generally used carefully read aloud sentences. In this paper we show that synthetic voices built with HMM-based speech synthesis techniques from conversational speech data, preserved segmental and prosodic characteristics of frequent conversational speech phenomena. An analysis of an evaluation investigating the perception of quality and speaking style of HMM-based voices confirms that speech with conversational characteristics are instrumental for listeners to perceive successful integration of conversational speech phenomena in synthetic speech. The achieved synthetic speech quality provides an encouraging start for the continued use of conversational speech in HMM-based speech synthesis.