An Experimental Study on Vietnamese Speech Synthesis

The modern Vietnamese is a monosyllabic tone language. Each syllable can be marked with initial, final and tone. In this paper, Vietnamese speech synthesis system is realized by using a trainable HMM-based speech synthesis method. The basic synthesis units of this system are initials and finals. According to the characteristics of Vietnamese, we have conducted such works as collecting corpus, recording, labeling, determining the phonemes list, and designing context attributes and question set. Then Vietnamese speech synthesis system is constructed by using the STRAIGHT synthesizer under the HTS platform. At last, we conduct a subjective test to synthetic speech signals. The results of preliminary evaluation show that the intelligibility of the utterances is approximately 100%, and the quality of synthesis speech is from fair to good.