Performance Evaluation of Speech Synthesis Techniques for English Language

Abstract

The conversion of text to synthetic production of speech is known as text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). This can be achieved by the method of concatenative speech synthesis (CSS) and hidden Markov model techniques. Quality is the important paradigm for the artificial speech produced. The study involves the comparative analysis for quality of speech synthesis using hidden Markov model and unit selection approach. The quality of synthesized speech is evaluated with the two methods, i.e., subjective measurement using mean opinion score and objective measurement based on mean square score and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient features are also extracted for synthesized speech. The experimental analysis shows that unit selection method results in better synthesized voice than hidden Markov model.