ISCA Archive WHERE IS THE INFORMATION IN SPEECH? (and to what extent can it be modelled in synthesis?)

Di erent kinds of speech information are meaningfully used in human communication. This paper attempts to show how they can be modelled in speech synthesis and suggests that many conventional synthesis methods may fail to take into account the subtleties of human speech variation. It argues that modelling of voice quality should be the next main goal for speech synthesis technology, and proposes that evaluations of synthesis technology should aim to include a Turing component, which measures the ability of each system to perform on a range of human-speech features.