Third ESCA/COCOSDA Workshop on Speech Synthesis November 26-29, 1998 Jenolan Caves House, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

Foreign Language Speech System

Nick Campbell

ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Labs. Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, Japan

This paper describes a method of concatenative speech synthesis for producing speech in a language other than that of the database speaker. In certain applications, such as interpreted dialogues or multi-lingual e-mail, it is necessary to synthesise words that are foreign with respect to the language of the main text. In this case, rather than switch voices, we show that the use of an intermediate stage of synthesis improves the pronunciation and prosody of the output speech.

Full Paper (with 6 sound examples linked from within the paper)

Bibliographic reference.  Campbell, Nick (1998): "Foreign Language Speech System", In SSW3-1998, 177-180.