Developing a Test Bed of English Text-to-Speech System XIMERA for the Blizzard Challenge 2006
Tomoki Toda, Hisashi Kawai, Toshio Hirai, Jinfu Ni, Nobuyuki Nishizawa, Junichi Yamagishi, Minoru Tsuzaki, Keiichi Tokuda, Satoshi Nakamura · 2006
This paper describes the development of a test bed English Textto-Speech (TTS) system XIMERA at ATR for Blizzard Challenge 2006. The original XIMERA is aimed at constructing very highquality Japanese TTS. Therefore, several modules are customized for our huge-sized Japanese speech corpora. In order to participate in the Blizzard Challenge 2006, we construct a test bed of English TTS by modifying the original XIMERA without carefully system optimizations. Results of the challenge tell us a current level of our system and clarify points to be improved. This paper also discusses techniques adopted in XIMERA compared with many others.