Phone-based speech synthesis with neural network and articulatory control

This paper presents a novel method for synthesizing speech signal using a phone-based concatenation approach. Neural network is employed for the generalization of the phone templates during synthesis. Simpli ed articulatory space input parameters based on a modi ed vowel diagram are used to provide exible and e ective articulatory control. It also enables the design of an articulatory control model for allophonic variations in speech signal. The network approach is chosen for its non-linear mapping of the relationship between the articulatory space parameters and the spectral information of speech signal. In addition, non-linear approximation for phone template transitions is facilitated. The phone templates of the synthesizer are implicitly stored as network parameters of a medium size network. The performance of this new speech synthesis technique is demonstrated with a prototype system speci cally designed for Cantonese (a common Chinese dialect) and the synthetic speech quality is assessed by informal listening tests.