TTS Evaluation Campaign with a Common Spanish Database
Iñaki Sainz, Eva Navas, Inma Hernáez, Antonio Bonafonte, Francisco Campillo · 2010
This paper describes the first TTS evaluation campaign designed for Spanish.Seven research institutions took part in the evaluation campaign and developed a voice from a common speech database provided by the organisation.Each participating team had a period of seven weeks to generate a voice.Next, a set of sentences were released and each team had to synthesise them within a week period.Finally, some of the synthesised test audio files were subjectively evaluated via an online test according to the following criteria: similarity to the original voice, naturalness and intelligibility.Box-plots, Wilcoxon tests and WER have been generated in order to analyse the results.Two main conclusions can be drawn: On the one hand, there is considerable margin for improvement to reach the quality level of the natural voice.On the other hand, two systems get significantly better results than the rest: one is based on statistical parametric synthesis and the other one is a concatenative system that makes use of a sinusoidal model to modify both prosody and smooth spectral joints.Therefore, it seems that some kind of spectral control is needed when building voices with a medium size database for unrestricted domains..