Embedded unit selection text-to-speech synthesis for mobile devices

Nowadays, unit selection based text-to-speech technology is the mainstream approach for near natural speech synthesis systems. However, this is achieved at the expense of raised requirements in terms of computational resources. This work describes design and implementation approaches for the efficient integration of this technology in computational environments with limited resources, such as mobile devices, with no considerable speech quality degradation. In particular, the issues of database reduction, acoustic inventory compression and runtime computational load minimization are mainly addressed in this paper. Both objective and subjective assessments confirm the effectiveness of these approaches in terms of constructing a general purpose embedded unit selection TTS system and reducing the computational requirements while maintaining high speech quality.