Tamás Gábor Csapó, Csaba Zainkó, Géza Németh
A study of prosodic variability methods in a corpus-based unit selection text-to-speech system
A study of prosodic variability methods in a corpus-based unit selection text-to-speech system
Keywords: prosody variation, corpus-based TTS
This paper introduces the implementation and evaluation of a method to increase the prosodic variability of synthesized speech. Different generated prosody target versions were tested in a Hungarian corpus-based unit selection Text-To-Speech (TTS) system: the baseline prosody of the synthesizer, a rule-based prosody target and the prosody of the new method. It is based on F0 database templates which are derived from natural sentence corpora. Our method was tested in a Hungarian system, and it can be extended to other European languages with fixed (e.g. Finnish) and varying stress.