TTS evaluation campaign with a common spanish database

This paper describes the first TTS evaluation campaign designed for Spanish. Seven research institutions took part in the evaluation campaign and developed a voice from a common speech database provided by the organisation. Each participating team had a period of seven weeks to generate a voice. Next, a set of sentences were released and each team had to synthesise them within a week period. Finally, some of the synthesised test audio files were subjectively evaluated via an online test according to the following criteria: similarity to the original voice, naturalness and intelligibility. Box-plots, Wilcoxon tests and WER have been generated in order to analyse the results. Two main conclusions can be drawn: On the one hand, there is considerable margin for improvement to reach the quality level of the natural voice. On the other hand, two systems get significantly better results than the rest: one is based on statistical parametric synthesis and the other one is a concatenative system that makes use of a sinusoidal model to modify both prosody and smooth spectral joints. Therefore, it seems that some kind of spectral control is needed when building voices with a medium size database for unrestricted domains.Postprint (published version

Can older people remember medication reminders presented using synthetic speech?

Reminders are often part of interventions to help older people adhere to complicated medication regimes. Computer-generated (synthetic) speech is ideal for tailoring reminders to different medication regimes. Since synthetic speech may be less intelligible than human speech, in particular under difficult listening conditions, we assessed how well older people can recall synthetic speech reminders for medications. 44 participants aged 50-80 with no cognitive impairment recalled reminders for one or four medications after a short distraction. We varied background noise, speech quality, and message design. Reminders were presented using a human voice and two synthetic voices. Data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models. Reminder recall was satisfactory if reminders were restricted to one familiar medication, regardless of the voice used. Repeating medication names supported recall of lists of medications. We conclude that spoken reminders should build on familiar information and be integrated with other adherence support measures. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] numbered affiliations see end of article