Abstract
To enhance the communication between human and robots at home in the future, speech synthesis interfaces are indispensable that can generate expressive speech. In addition, synthesizing celebrity voice is commercially important. For these issues, this paper proposes techniques for synthesizing natural-sounding speech that has a rich prosodic personality using a limited amount of data in a text-to-speech (TTS) system. As a target speaker, we chose a well-known prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, who has a good prosodic personality in his speeches. To synthesize natural-sounding and prosodically rich speech, accurate phrasing, robust duration prediction, and rich intonation modeling are important. For these purpose, we propose pause position prediction based on conditional random fields (CRFs), phone-duration prediction using random forests, and mora-based emphasis context labeling. We examine the effectiveness of the above techniques through objective and subjective evaluations.
Highlights
In the near future, people will have their own personal robots that support their daily life by communicating each other
We propose pause position prediction based on conditional random fields (CRFs), phone-duration prediction using random forests, and mora-based emphasis context labeling
We focused on synthesizing the voice of the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, as the target speaker
Summary
People will have their own personal robots that support their daily life by communicating each other. To achieve such robots, speech recognition and synthesis interfaces are indispensable to make the communication of human-machine close to that of human-human. Most of the studies focus on synthesizing reading-style speech of news articles where the speaking style is always stable without prosodically rich expressions such as emphasis and emotions. Prosody of speech generally represents accent, intonation, rhythm, power, and phrasing (pause insertion) and has a rich personality. As a step of speech synthesis to generate more human-like speech for various applications including humanoid robots, synthesizing speech with a rich prosodic personality is an essential issue
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