The rhythmic component in speech synthesis often remains rather rudimentary, despite recent major efforts in the modeling of prosodic models. The European COST Action 258 has identified this problem as one of the next challenges for speech synthesis. This paper is a contribution to a new, promising approach that was tested on a French temporal model.

This paper is concerned with the evaluation of speech rate in French. Usually, this dynamic parameter is described as a unidimensional quantitative dimension. It is shown that the slowing down of speech has also major qualitative effects that must be taken into account. The theory on slowing down speech is thus revised.

This paper, based on a selected one hour of expressive speech, is a pilot study on how to use breath segments to get more natural and expressive speech. It mainly deals with the status of when the breath segments occur and how the acoustic features are affected by the speaker ’s emotional states in terms of valence and activation. Statistical analysis is made to investigate the relationship bet...

In this paper, we propose to evaluate the quality of emotional speech synthesis by means of an automatic emotion identification system. We test this approach using five different parametric speech synthesis systems, ranging from plain non-emotional synthesis to full re-synthesis of pre-recorded speech. We compare the results achieved with the automatic system to those of human perception tests....

This paper aims at determining the characteristics of a face image by extracting its components. The FASY (FAce SYnthesis) System is a Face Database Retrieval and new Face generation System that is under development. One of its main features is the generation of the requested face when it is not found in the existing database, which allows a continuous growing of the database also. To generate ...

This paper presents an investigation of the visual variation on the bilabial plosive consonant /p/ in three coarticulation contexts. The aim is to provide detailed ensemble analysis to assist coarticulation modelling in visual speech synthesis. The underlying dynamics of labeled visual speech units, represented as lip shape, from symmetric VCV utterances, is investigated. Variation in lip dynam...