First Experiments on Text-to-Speech System Personification

In the present paper, several experiments on text-to-speech system personification are described. The personification enables TTS system to produce new voices by employing voice conversion methods. The baseline speech synthetizer is a concatenative corpus-based TTS system which utilizes the unit selection method. The voice identity change is performed by the transformation of spectral envelope, spectral detail and pitch. Two different personification approaches are compared in this paper. The former is based on the transformation of the original speech corpus, the latter transforms the output of the synthesizer. Specific advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are discussed and their performance is compared in listening tests.