Fast Speech in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

Moers-Prinz D. Fast Speech in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2020.Speech synthesis is part of the everyday life of many people with severe visual disabilities. For those who are reliant on assistive speech technology the possibility to choose a fast speaking rate is reported to be essential. But also expressive speech synthesis and other spoken language interfaces may require an integration of fast speech. Architectures like formant or diphone synthesis are able to produce synthetic speech at fast speech rates, but the generated speech does not sound very natural. Unit selection synthesis systems, however, are capable of delivering more natural output. Nevertheless, fast speech has not been adequately implemented into such systems to date. Thus, the goal of the work presented here was to determine an optimal strategy for modeling fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis to provide potential users with a more natural sounding alternative for fast speech output

Assessing the adequate treatment of fast speech in unit selection systems for the visually impaired

Moers D, Wagner P. Assessing the adequate treatment of fast speech in unit selection systems for the visually impaired. In: Proceedings of the 6th ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW-6). 2007: 282-287.This paper describes work in progress concerning the adequate modeling of fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis systems – mostly having in mind blind and visually impaired users. Initially, a survey of the main phonetic characteristics of fast speech will be given. From this, certain conclusions concerning an adequate modeling of fast speech in unit selection synthesis will be drawn. Subsequently, a questionnaire assessing synthetic speech related preferences of visually impaired users will be presented. The last section deals with future experiments aiming at a definition of criteria for the development of synthesis corpora modeling fast speech within the unit selection paradigm

Assessing a speaker for fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis

Moers D, Wagner P. Assessing a speaker for fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis. In: Proceedings of Interspeech. 2009: 2071-2074.This paper describes work in progress concerning the ad- equate modeling of fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis systems, mostly having in mind blind and visually impaired users. Initially, a survey of the main characteristics of fast speech will be given. Subsequently, strategies for fast speech production will be discussed. Certain requirements concerning the ability of a speaker of a fast speech unit selection inventory are drawn. The following section deals with a perception study where a selected speaker's ability to speak fast is investigated. To conclude, a preliminary perceptual analysis of the recordings for the speech synthesis corpus is presented. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection, fast speec

Evaluation eines Sprechers für schnell gesprochene Sprache in der Unit-Selection basierten Sprachsynthese

Moers D, Wagner P. Evaluation eines Sprechers für schnell gesprochene Sprache in der Unit-Selection basierten Sprachsynthese. In: ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation. Aachen; 2008.Unser Beitrag befasst sich mit der akustischen und perzeptiven Evaluation eines Sprechers, der aufgrund einer globalen Vorauswahl für das Aufsprechen eines schnell gesprochenen Bausteininventars für die Unit- Selection basierte Sprachsynthese als geeignet erscheint. Hierzu wird zunächst ein Überblick über die phonetischen Eigenschaften schnell gesprochener Sprache gegeben. Danach wird die H&H-Theorie dargelegt, welche verschiedene Strategien schnellen Sprechens erläutert, aus denen Anforderungen an den Sprecher und damit wichtige Voraussetzungen für seine Eignung abgeleitet werden. Anschließend wird ein Perzeptionsexperiment vorgestellt, dessen Ergebnisse ebenso wie die Ergebnisse einer akustischen Analyse der Aufnahmen die aus der Vorauswahl gewonnenen Eindrücke sowie die aus der H&H-Theorie abgeleiteten Anforderungen untermauern

Erzeugung schnell gesprochener Sprache in der Unit-Selection-Sprachsynthese

Moers D, Wagner P, Möbius B. Erzeugung schnell gesprochener Sprache in der Unit-Selection-Sprachsynthese. In: Proceedings of ESSV 2010. 2010

Integrating a fast speech corpus in unit selection speech synthesis: Experiments on perception, segmentation and duration prediction

Moers D, Wagner P, Möbius B, Müllers F, Jauk I. Integrating a fast speech corpus in unit selection speech synthesis: Experiments on perception, segmentation and duration prediction. In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010. 2010: P2a-28.This paper examines viable paths for integrating a fast speech corpus into a unit selection synthesis system. After selecting a suitable speaker, two inventories were recorded: one at normal and one at fast speech rate articulated as accurately as possible. A perceptual evaluation showed that for ultra fast speech rate, stimuli generated from fast utterances were judged to be as intelligible as stimuli generated from normal rate utterances; moreover, they were clearly preferred with respect to naturalness. Based on the results of an automatic phone segmentation which produced only marginal differences in label timing accuracy, CART based duration prediction models for both corpora were built. Prediction accuracy was very similar. We concluded that automatic phone segmentation and CART based duration prediction are applicable to both normal and fast rate recordings

Assessing the Adequate Treatment of Fast Speech

This paper describes work in progress concerning the adequate modeling of fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis systems – mostly having in mind blind and visually impaired users. Initially, a survey of the main phonetic characteristics of fast speech will be given. From this, certain conclusions concerning an adequate modeling of fast speech in unit selection synthesis will be drawn. Subsequently, a questionnaire assessing synthetic speech related preferences of visually impaired users will be presented. The last section deals with future experiments aiming at a definition of criteria for the development of synthesis corpora modeling fast speech within the unit selection paradigm. 1

Synthesizing Fast Speech by Implementing Multi-Phone Units in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

This paper presents a new approach to synthesizing fast speech in unit selection synthesis. After recording two inventories- one at normal and one at fast speech rate articulated as accurately as possible- speech was synthesized from both corpora independently. Since fast speech differs from normal rate speech in terms of acoustic characteristics, the concept of multi-phone (phoxsy) units [1] was implemented and used to synthesize speech at both speaking rates again. A perceptual evaluation showed that phoxsy units enhanced the intelligibility especially for fast synthetic speech significantly. Index Terms: fast speech, unit selection, phoxsy units 1

Schnell gesprochene Sprache in der Unit-Selection-Sprachsynthese: Untersuchungen zu Korpuserstellung und -aufbereitung

Moers D, Wagner P, Möbius B, Müllers F, Jauk I. Schnell gesprochene Sprache in der Unit-Selection-Sprachsynthese: Untersuchungen zu Korpuserstellung und -aufbereitung. In: Proceedings of ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation. 2010