Polish unit selection speech synthesis with BOSS: extensions and speech corpora

This article presents research and development aimed at creating a Polish speech database for speech synthesis and adapting BOSS (The Bonn Open Synthesis System) to the Polish language. First of all, the linguistic background for the design of Polish spoken resources for unit selection is presented, together with the presentation of the applied transcription and annotation methods. The next section details the assumptions and the structure of the Polish corpus and its segmental and prosodic annotation. Then, the linguistic features used in duration modelling and the selection of adequate speech units of two Polish modules in BOSS are reported: the duration prediction module (the description is accompanied by a concise overview of Polish duration modelling for speech technology purposes) and the cost functions module. Finally, the results of two kinds of G. Demenko · K. Klessa Instytut Językoznawstwa, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań, Poland G. Demenko e-mail: [email protected] K. Klessa e-mail: [email protected] M. Szymański Laboratorium Zintegrowanych Systemów Przetwarzania Języka i Mowy, Poznańskie Centrum Superkomputerowo-Sieciowe, Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej PAN, Poznań, Poland e-mail: [email protected] S. Breuer ( ) · W. Hess Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaften, Abteilung Sprache und Kommunikation, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] W. Hess e-mail: [email protected] perception tests are discussed: the first is a preference test aimed at the evaluation of synthesized speech obtained using three variants of speech signal segmentation (automatic, semi-automatic and manual) and the second is a mean opinion score test carried out to provide a preliminary assessment of the synthesized speech quality attained with the Polish version of the BOSS synthesizer. The closing chapter summarizes future perspectives and challenges for the Polish TTS (text-to-speech) and further developments of BOSS for Polish.