Slovak Speech Database for Experiments and Application Building in Unit-Selection Speech Synthesis

After the years of hesitation the conservative Slovak telecommunication market seems to become conscious of the need of voice driven services. In the last year, all the three telecommunication operators have adopted our text to speech system Kempelen in their interactive voice response systems. The diphone concatenative synthesis has probably reached the frontier of its abilities and so the next step is to check for a synthesis method giving more intelligible and more natural synthesized speech with better prosody modelling. Therefore we have decided to build a one speaker speech database in Slovak for experiments and application building in unit-selection speech synthesis. To build such a database, we tried to exploit as much of the existing speech resources in Slovak as possible, to utilize the knowledge from previous projects and to use the existing routines developed at our department. The paper describes the structure, recording and annotation of this database as well as first experiments with unit-selection speech synthesizer.