HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL BASED SPEECH SYNTHESIS SYSTEM IN SLOVAK LANGUAGE WITH SPEAKER INTERPOLATION

Abstract

This paper describes the first experiments with speaker interpolation in Slovak speech synthesis system. The interpolation provides an approach to voice characteristic conversion for hidden Markov model based text-to-speech synthesis system. The main idea of this technique is to synthesize an artificial speech with unseen and untrained output speech characteristic by interpolating of the existing sets of the pretrained models. The use of this technique allows to create new voices without the need to add additional data into training procedure. This is a major advantage especially for the low resources languages, such as Slovak language, where it is often difficult to obtain the necessary amount of data. The obtained results shows that the characteristics of the synthesized speech is changed from one male speaker to another one with the help of the interpolation ratio by which the Slovak voices with the new characteristics may be crated.