The work involved in building synthetic voices has substantially simplified over the past few years, partly due to support through the FestVox project, a free set of scripts, tools, and documentation for building voices in new and already supported languages (http://www.festvox.org). However, the building of reliable high quality synthetic voices still requires a substantial amount of skill. In this tutorial I will outline the basic processes required in building new synthetic voices, including phoneset definitions, data collection, labeling, lexicon construction, evaluation, etc. I will also discuss aspects of voice building when considering minority languages where standard resources are not readily available. Finally, I will discuss some of the challenges in making the building of synthetic voices more robust and such that it requires less knowledge of speech technology to be successful.
Cite as: Black, A.W. (2004) Overview of voice building. Proc. 5th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 5), (abstract)
@inproceedings{black04_ssw,
author={Alan W. Black},
title={{Overview of voice building}},
year=2004,
booktitle={Proc. 5th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 5)},
pages={(abstract)}
}