A recognizer trained with full-bandwidth speech performs badly when recognizing band-limited speech because of environment mismatch. In this paper, we have proposed a novel model synthesis method for band-limited speech recognition. It detects speech bandwidth automatically and synthesizes a new acoustic model only using a full-bandwidth model when the bandwidth has been changed. Experiments co...

The authors have proposed a method of generating synthetic speech with emotion by creating three copora of emotional speech for use with CHATR [1][2], the concatenative speech synthesis system developed at ATR [3][4]. The corpora express joy, anger and sadness. For the previous trial, speech corpora were made with female voice. Having added speech corpora of male voice, the authors developed a ...

Unit selection based concatenative speech synthesis has proven to be a successful method of producing high quality speech output. However, in order to produce high quality speech, large speech databases are required. For some applications, this is not practical due to the complexity of the database search process and the storage requirements of such databases. In this paper, we propose a data-d...

Recent studies have shown that DNN-based speech synthesis can produce more natural synthesized speech than the conventional HMM-based speech synthesis. However, an open problem remains as to whether the synthesized speech quality can be improved by utilizing a multi-speaker speech corpus. To address this problem, this paper proposes DNN-based speech synthesis using speaker codes as a simple met...

This paper presents a method to control the characteristics of synthetic speech flexibly by integrating articulatory features into a Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based parametric speech synthesis system. In contrast to model adaptation and interpolation approaches for speaking style control, this method is driven by phonetic knowledge, and target speech samples are not required. The joint distribu...

This paper focuses on a method for automatically dividing speech utterances into phonemic segments, which are used for constructing synthesis unit inventories for speech synthesis. Here, we propose a new segmentation parameter called, “dynamics of fundamental frequency (DF0).” In the fine structures of F0 contours, there exist phonemic events which are observed as local dips at phonemic transit...

Speech synthesis is an important modality in Cognitive Infocommunications, which is the intersection of informatics and cognitive sciences. Statistical parametric methods have gained importance in speech synthesis recently. The speech signal is decomposed to parameters and later restored from them. The decomposition is implemented by speech coders. We apply a novel codebook-based speech coding ...

This paper describes a new method for synthesizing speech by concatenating sub-word units from a database of labelled speech. A large unit inventory is created by automatically clustering units of the same phone class based on their phonetic and prosodic context. The appropriate cluster is then selected for a target unit offering a small set of candidate units. An optimal path is found through ...

Current lexica for speech technology typically contain much redundancy, while omitting useful information. A comparison with lexica in other media and for other purposes is instructive, as it highlights some features we may borrow for text-to-speech and speech recognition lexica. We describe some aspects of the new lexicon we are producing, Combilex, whose structure and implementation is specif...

During conversation, spoken utterances occur in rich acoustic contexts, including speech produced by our interlocutor(s) and speech we produced ourselves. Prosodic characteristics of the acoustic context have been known to influence speech perception in a contrastive fashion: for instance, a vowel presented in a fast context is perceived to have a longer duration than the same vowel in a slow c...