The DIPLOMAT project at Carnegie Mellon University instantiates a program of rapid-deployment speech-to-speech machine translation; we have developed techniques for quickly producing text-to-speech (TTS) systems for new target languages to support this work. While the resulting systems are not immediately of comparable quality to commercial systems on unrestricted tasks in well-developed languages, they are more than adequate for limited-domain scenarios and rapid prototyping - they generalize to unseen data with some degradation, while quality in-domain can be quite good. Voices and engines for synthesizing new target languages may be developed in a period as short as two weeks after text corpus collection. We have successfully used these techniques to build a TTS module for English, Croatian, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Korean.
Cite as: Lenzo, K., Hogan, C., Allen, J. (1998) Rapid-deployment text-to-speech in the DIPLOMAT system. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0868, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-35
@inproceedings{lenzo98_icslp,
author={Kevin Lenzo and Christopher Hogan and Jeffrey Allen},
title={{Rapid-deployment text-to-speech in the DIPLOMAT system}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0868},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-35}
}