The acceptability of the synthetic voices used by the multimodal SmartKom dialog system was tested in a series of experiments. Early in the project a first set of evaluation tasks was carried out to verify the intelligibility of the diphone voice which serves as the default voice for external open domain applications. The tests confirmed that the diphone voice produced satisfactory intelligibility. The speech corpus for the unit selection voice recorded by the same speaker is tailored to the typical, more restricted, SmartKom domains. Evaluation tasks focusing on typical SmartKom scenarios demonstrated the superiority of the unit selection voice. In tasks involving open-domain material, however, intelligibility of the unit selection voice appears to be less consistent than that of the diphone voice. In an audio-visual assessment task involving SmartKom specific contexts, the unit selection voice was found to be very well accepted and judged to be satisfactorily intelligible.
Cite as: Schweitzer, A., Braunschweiler, N., Dogil, G., Möbius, B. (2004) Assessing the acceptability of the Smartkom speech synthesis voices. Proc. 5th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 5), 1-6
@inproceedings{schweitzer04_ssw,
author={Antje Schweitzer and Norbert Braunschweiler and Grzegorz Dogil and Bernd Möbius},
title={{Assessing the acceptability of the Smartkom speech synthesis voices}},
year=2004,
booktitle={Proc. 5th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis (SSW 5)},
pages={1--6}
}