Generating and manipulating emotional synthetic speech on a personal computer

Abstract

Against a background of incorporating a talking head into a role-playing simulator, enhancements are proposed for users of the simulator and of text-to-speech systems in general. The first is the ability to generate vocal emotion in synthetic speech using a limited number of prosodic parameters with a concatenative speech synthesizer. The second enhancement allows for vocal emotions to be included during the authoring of text for output by the text-to-speech system. Vocal emotions can be represented visually, and can be manipulated directly by the user. Applications such as training simulators that use synthetic speech can be made more ‘human’ by the addition of emotions. A graphical editor for specifying and directly manipulating the speech improves the authoring environment of these applications.