Recent Development of HMM-Based Expressive Speech Synthesis and Its Applications

This paper describes the recent development of HMM-based expressive speech synthesis. Although the expressive speech includes a wide variety of expressions such as emotions, speaking styles, intention, attitude, emphasis, focus, and so on, we mainly refer to the speech synthesis techniques for emotions and speaking styles, which would be the most primary expressions in human speech communication. We describe five core techniques, i.e., style modeling, style adaptation, style interpolation, style control, and style estimation. In addition, we also give a brief overview of other applications to expressive speech synthesis and recognition.