The Cerevoice Blizzard Entry 2006: A Prototype Small Database Unit Selection Engine
Matthew P. Aylett, Christopher J. Pidcock, Mark E. Fraser · 2006
Cerevoice R is a unit selection speech synthesis system produced by Cereproc Ltd. The system was used to build small and large unit selection databases using the data supplied by the Blizzard Challenge 2006. The large database system was used as a baseline system while two experimental approaches for improving the quality of the small database system were explored. 1) Synthetically generating diphones from sections of diphones in the database offline and then using them in synthesis, a process we term bulking. 2) Applying limited manual intervention based on negative feedback to improve quality, a process we term second-pass synthesis. Both techniques resulted in the small database system maintaining the quality of the larger system. We conclude that there is much room for improvement in the quality of small database systems using unit selection without the requirement for more data and that second-pass synthesis offers a potential means for training small database unit selection systems. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection.