Implementation and verification of speech database for unit selection speech synthesis
Krzysztof Szklanny, Sebastian Koszuta · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2017
The main aim of this study was to prepare a new speech database for the purpose of unit selection speech synthesis.The object was to design a database with improved parameters compared with the existing database [1], making use of the theses proved in studies [2]-[4].The quality of the corpus, a selection of the suitable speaker, and the quality of the speech database are all crucially important for the quality of synthesized speech.The considerably larger text corpora used in the study as well as the broader multiple balancing of the database yielded a greater number of varied acoustic units.For the purpose of the recording, one voice talent was selected from among a group of 30 professional speakers.The next stage involved database segmentation.The resultant database was then verified with a prototype speech synthesizer.The quality of the synthetic speech was compared to that of synthetic speech obtained in other Polish unit selection speech synthesis systems.Consequently, the end result proved to be better than the one obtained in the previous study [4].The database had been supplemented and extended, significantly enhancing the quality of synthesized speech.