INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Speech Synthesis Parameter Generation for the Assistive Silent Speech Interface MVOCA

Robin Hofe (1), Stephen R. Ell (2), Michael J. Fagan (2), James M. Gilbert (2), Phil D. Green (1), Roger K. Moore (1), Sergey I. Rybchenko (2)

(1) University of Sheffield, UK
(2) University of Hull, UK

In previous publications, a silent speech interface based on permanent-magnetic articulography (PMA) has been introduced and evaluated using standard automatic speech recognition techniques. However, word recognition is a task that is computationally expensive and introduces a significant time delay between speech articulation and generation of the acoustic signal. This paper investigates a direct synthesis approach where control parameters for parametric speech synthesis are generated directly from the sensor data of the silent speech interface, without an intermediate lexical representation. Users of such a device would not be tied to the limited vocabulary of a word-based recogniser and could therefore express themselves more freely. This paper presents a feasibility study that investigates whether it is possible to infer speech synthesis parameters from PMA sensor data.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hofe, Robin / Ell, Stephen R. / Fagan, Michael J. / Gilbert, James M. / Green, Phil D. / Moore, Roger K. / Rybchenko, Sergey I. (2011): "Speech synthesis parameter generation for the assistive silent speech interface MVOCA", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 3009-3012.