EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Unit Size in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

S.P. Kishore (1), Alan W. Black (2)

(1) International Institute of Information Technology, India
(2) Carnegie Mellon University, USA

In this paper, we address the issue of choice of unit size in unit selection speech synthesis. We discuss the development of a Hindi speech synthesizer and our experiments with different choices of units: syllable, diphone, phone and half phone. Perceptual tests conducted to evaluate the quality of the synthesizers with different unit size indicate that the syllable synthesizer performs better than the phone, diphone and half phone synthesizers, and the half phone synthesizer performs better than diphone and phone synthesizers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kishore, S.P. / Black, Alan W. (2003): "Unit size in unit selection speech synthesis", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1317-1320.