Template-driven Emotions Generation in Malay Text-to-Speech: A Preliminary Experiment

This paper describes the pilot experiment conducted for the purpose of adding an affective component to the first Malay Text-to-Speech (TTS) system, Fasih. The aim is to test a new method of generating an expressive speech via a template-driven system based on diphones as the basic sound. The synthesized expressive speech can express four types of emotion. However, as an initial test the pilot experiment focused on anger and sadness. The results from this test show an impressive recognition rate of over 60% for the synthesized speech of both emotions. The pilot experiment has paved the way for the development of an emotions filter to be embedded into Fasih, thus allowing for the possibility of generating an unrestricted Malay