Sistema de conversión texto-voz en lengua gallega basado en la selección combinada de unidades acústicas y prosódicas

En esta comunicación se describe un sistema de conversión texto-voz en lengua gallega basado en las denominadas “técnicas de síntesis basadas en corpus”. A diferencia de los tradicionales sintetizadores de voz por concatenación, que normalmente utilizan un conjunto de unidades de síntesis reducido, los sistemas de síntesis basados en corpus consideran múltiples realizaciones de cada unidad y, mediante técnicas de programación dinámica, seleccionan aquella secuencia de unidades que minimiza una función de coste. Por otro lado, tradicionalmente, la generación de la información prosódica se realiza en una etapa previa a la selección de unidades, lo que ocasiona que en muchas ocasiones sea necesario manipular en exceso las unidades seleccionadas con el fin de ajustarlas a la entonación, duración y energía deseadas. En este artículo también se propone la selección conjunta del contorno entonativo y de las unidades de síntesis, con objeto de minimizar la distorsión causada por las modificaciones prosódicas.In this contribution we describe a corpus-based text-to-speech system for Galician. While traditional concatenative speech-synthesis systems generally employ a quite reduced set of speech units, corpus-based synthesis systems consider many instances of every unit and, by means of dynamic programming techniques, select the sequence of units that minimizes a cost function. With reference to prosody, traditionally, the generation of the prosodic information is carried out in a previous stage to unit selection. This fact implies that, in many cases, the selected speech units must be manipulated in excess in order to fit the desired prosody. In this paper we also propose a method for combined selection of the intonation contour and the sequence of speech units in order to minimize the distortion due to prosodic modifications

Design and development of a speech synthesis software for colombian spanish applied to communication through mobile devices

In several scenarios of everyday life, there is a need to communicate orally with other people. However, various technological solutions such as mobile phones cannot be used in places such as meetings, classrooms, or conference rooms without disrupting the activities of people around the speaker. This research develops a tool that enables people to establish a conversation in a public place without disrupting the surrounding environment. To this end, a speech synthesizer is implemented on a personal computer connected to a cell phone, which allows one to establish a mobile call without using the human voice. The speech synthesizer uses the diphone concatenation technique and is developed specifically for the Spanish from Colombia. A mathematical description of the synthesizer shows the decomposition of the synthesizer into various mutually independent processes. Several user-acceptance and quality tests of the obtained signal were performed to evaluate the performance of the tool. The results show a high signal to noise ratio of generated signals and a high intelligibility of the tool