Improvements in Speech Synthesis

Why is this so, and what can be done about it?

Prosodic processing must be rendered more varied and more appropriate to the speech situation

• Timing, melodic control and the relationships between the various prosodic parameters need increased attention
• Signal processing systems must be developed and perfected that are capable of generating more than just one voice from a database
• A better understanding must be achieved of what distinguishes one voice from another, and of how speech styles differ between simply reading aloud numbers and sentences and their use in interactive speech
• New evaluation methodologies should be developed to provide objective and subjective measurements of the intelligibility of the synthetic speech and the cognitive load imposed upon the listener by impoverished stimuli
• Adequate text markup systems must be proposed and tested with multiple languages in real-world situations
• Further research is required to integrate speech synthesis systems into larger natural-language processing systems

Improvements in Speech Synthesis presents the latest research in the above areas. Contributors include speech synthesis specialists from 16 countries, with experience in the development of systems for 12 European languages. This volume emerges from a four-year European COST project focussed on The Naturalness of Synthetic Speech, and will be a valuable text for everyone involved in speech synthesis.

Improvements in Speech Synthesis: Cost 258: The Naturalness of Synthetic Speech
E. Keller , G. Bailly , A. Monaghan , J. Terken , M. Huckvale

Current work in speech synthesis is in an interesting double position. At the same time as increasingly natural-sounding speech synthesis, systems are being implemented for many of the world’s languages on the basis of existing, increasingly well-understood concatenative technology. This technology entails some inherent limitations, and research on further improvements is still proceeding rapidly. The proposed volume is an accumulation of studies emanating from COST 258, a European Action concerned with the issues in the improvement of speech synthesis.