The Bonn Open Synthesis System 3

Abstract

The Bonn Open Synthesis System (BOSS) is an open-source software distribution for unit selection speech synthesis that aims to be easily extensible to new target languages and different applications. To achieve this flexibility, many aspects of the software have been changed in recent years, including the addition of a refined interface to synthesis modules and a more strict separation of language-specific and language-independent code. This article wants to give an overview of the architecture from a technical perspective and explain how it can be adapted for a particular purpose and voice. This is preceded by a short introduction to the unit selection paradigm in general and a section on the specifics of the approach taken by BOSS. A particular focus will be placed on the extensions made for the integration of Polish during which some of the flexibilisation measures were conducted. Further information on the application to Polish but with an emphasis on the linguistic, phonetic and acoustic aspects as well as the speech corpus used can be found in the second part of this two-part article, “Polish unit selection speech synthesis with BOSS”, also published in this issue of the Journal.