Multilingual models in the IBM bilingual text-to-speech systems
Jaime Botella Ordinas, Volker Fischer, Claire Waast-Richard · 2005
In this paper we describe the role of multilingualmodels in the creation and deploymentof unit selection based bilingual speech synthesizers. We first review the definition of a multilingual phonetic alphabet for the simultaneous recognition of up to fifteen languages, and then discuss synthesis specific modifications that allow a more detailed description of the synthesizers’ unit inventories. Furthermore, we investigate on the use of multilingual phonologicaldecision trees for a fast identification of candidate segments, and for the predictionof pitch and durationtargets duringsynthesis. Experimental results for two different combinations of languages demonstrate the feasibility of multilingual modeling for speech synthesis.