A new waveform speech synthesis approach based on the COC speech spectrum

This paper proposes a high quality speech synthesis system based on waveform synthesis. Our most recent text-to-speech (TTS) system achieved very good performance by using waveform synthesis units. The system, however, required a very large speech data base. A compact system could only be created by developing a very small data package. This paper proposes new approach to speech synthesis based on waveform segments. A novel point of the approach is its simple algorithm which effectively forms synthesis unit package using the clustering technique. The algorithm is applied to our TTS system. Evaluation by listening tests confirm the good performance of the algorithm