The performance of current high quality concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) systems is limited under noisy environments. This paper investigates whether or not the intelligibility of synthesized speech in noise can be improved by emphasizing the prosody. Additionally, the paper presents a method that can effectively emphasize the prosody of units in existing TTS databases. The circular linear pr...

--Text Normalization is an essential module for Text-to-Speech (TTS) system as TTS systems need to work on real text. This paper describes Myanmar number normalization designed for Myanmar Text-to-Speech system. Semiotic classes forMyanmar language are identified by the study of Myanmar text corpus and Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFST) based Myanmar number normalization is implemented. N...

A talking head system (THS) is presented to animate the face of a speaking 3D avatar in such a way that it realistically pronounces the given Korean text. The proposed system consists of SAPI compliant text-to-speech (TTS) engine and MPEG-4 compliant face animation generator. The input to the THS is a unicode text that is to be spoken with synchronized lip shape. The TTS engine generates a phon...

748 March 2013 U ncuffed tracheal tubes (TTs) have been the standard for tracheal intubation in infants and children for decades until the recent introduction of the Microcuff (Kimberley-clark, Roswell, GA) cuffed TT. evidence suggests that the incidence of perioperative airway events after use of these new TTs is small,1,2 although the evidence for their safe use in neonates and young infants ...

Voice database is one of the most important parts in TTS systems. However, creating a high quality new TTS voice is not an easy task even for a professional team. The whole process is rather complicated and contains plenty minutiae that should be handled carefully. In fact, in many stages, human interference such as manually checking or labeling is necessary. In multi-lingual situations, it is ...

A sinusoidal representation of speech is an alternative to the source-filter model. It is widely used in speech coding and unit-selection TTS, but is less common in statistical TTS frameworks. In this work we utilize Regularized Cepstral Coefficients (RCC) estimated in mel-frequency scale for amplitude spectrum envelope modeling within an HMM-based TTS platform. Improved subjective quality for ...

Text-to-speech synthesizer systems are of overall good quality, especially when adapted to a specific task. Given this task and an adapted voice corpus, the message quality is mainly dependent on the wording used. This paper presents how a paraphrase generator can be used in synergy with a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system to improve its overall performances. Our system is composed of a par...

This paper describes the development of the first text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer for Latvian language. It provides an overview of the project background and describes the general approach, the choices and particular implementation aspects of the principal TTS components: NLP, prosody and waveform generation. A novelty for waveform synthesis is the combination of corpusbased unit selection met...

This paper describes a high quality Japanese text to speech (TTS) system, PureTalk. This system is similar to the conventional diphone-based TTS using PSOLA except that PureTalk employs the following novel techniques which enable to produce more intelligible and natural-sounding speech: 1) two-stage duration modeling based on a linear regression technique, 2) F0 contour modeling using polynomia...

This paper reports a study of unit analysis for concatenative TTS, which usually has an inventory of hundreds of thousand of voice units. It is known that the quality of synthesis units is especially critical to the quality of resulting corpus-based TTS system. This research focuses on the analysis of a Chinese Cantonese unit inventory, which has been built earlier for open vocabulary Chinese C...