Impact of phonetic context mismatches on quality of vowel concatenations

This paper deals with the traditional problem of the occurrence of audible discontinuities at concatenation points at diphone boundaries in the concatenative speech synthesis. The results of the analysis of the effects of consonantal context mismatches on the quality of concatenations in vowels are presented. The study was conducted with two voices (one male and one female), and the results show that there are classes of consonants that have a significant impact on the concatenation quality. This impact is however not consistent across the two voices, and also for different vowels only few similarities can be found.