Polish unit selection speech synthesis with BOSS

Authors: Grażyna Demenko Katarzyna Klessa Marcin Szymański Stefan Breuer Wolfgang Hess

Publish Date: 2010/05/20

Volume: 13, Issue: 2, Pages: 85-99

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Abstract

This article presents research and development aimed at creating a Polish speech database for speech synthesis and adapting BOSS The Bonn Open Synthesis System to the Polish language First of all the linguistic background for the design of Polish spoken resources for unit selection is presented together with the presentation of the applied transcription and annotation methods The next section details the assumptions and the structure of the Polish corpus and its segmental and prosodic annotation Then the linguistic features used in duration modelling and the selection of adequate speech units of two Polish modules in BOSS are reported the duration prediction module the description is accompanied by a concise overview of Polish duration modelling for speech technology purposes and the cost functions module Finally the results of two kinds of perception tests are discussed the first is a preference test aimed at the evaluation of synthesized speech obtained using three variants of speech signal segmentation automatic semiautomatic and manual and the second is a mean opinion score test carried out to provide a preliminary assessment of the synthesized speech quality attained with the Polish version of the BOSS synthesizer The closing chapter summarizes future perspectives and challenges for the Polish TTS texttospeech and further developments of BOSS for Polish

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