On building a concatenative speech synthesis system from the blizzard challenge speech databases
Wael Hamza, R. Bakis, Zhi Wei Shuang, Heiga Zen · 2005
In this paper, we compare two methods of building a concatenative speech synthesis system from the relatively small, “Blizzard Challenge ” speech databases. In the first method we build a system directly from the Blizzard databases using the IBM Concatenetative Speech Synthesis System originally designed for very large speech databases. In the second method, a larger database is used to build the synthesis system and the output is “morphed ” to match the speakers in the Blizzard databases. The second method outperformed the first while maintaining the identity of the Blizzard target speakers. 1.