This paper discusses the problem of handling 'foreign' speech sounds in Swedish speech technology systems, in particular speech synthesis. A production study is made, where it is shown that Swedish speakers add foreign speech sounds, here termed 'xenophones', to their phone repertoire when reading Swedish sentences with embedded English names and words. As a result of the observations, the phone set of a Swedish concatenative synthesizer is extended, and it is shown (by example) that this produces more natural-sounding synthetic speech.
Cite as: Eklund, R., Lindström, A. (1998) How to handle "foreign" sounds in Swedish text-to-speech conversion: approaching the 'xenophone' problem. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0514, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-54
@inproceedings{eklund98_icslp,
author={Robert Eklund and Anders Lindström},
title={{How to handle "foreign" sounds in Swedish text-to-speech conversion: approaching the 'xenophone' problem}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0514},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-54}
}