Expressive prosody for unit-selection speech synthesis
Volker Strom, Robert Alfred Clark, Simon King · 2006
Current unit selection speech synthesis voices cannot produce emphasis or interrogative contours because of a lack of the necessary prosodic variation in the recorded speech database. A method of recording script design is proposed which addresses this shortcoming. Appropriate components were added to the target cost function of the Festival Multisyn engine, and a perceptual evaluation showed a clear preference over the baseline system.