A Chinese text-to-speech system based upon a syllable concatenation model

An unrestricted Chinese text-to-speech system has been successfully constructed. The text input which is written in Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II) instead of traditional Chinese orthography is analyzed by a simple parser. Then each syllable in the text is assigned proper duration and pitch, while its gain is modified, and its reflection coefficients interpolated or decimated. The stress, intonation and inter-syllable pause are also considered. In other words, a model of concatenating syllables of Mandarin Chinese based on simplified phonetic rules and some preliminary analysis of natural speech data is proposed. We believe that our model is sufficient compared with some more complicated approaches [1]. After editing the syllables according to our proposed synthesis rules, a continuous speech signal is synthesized, and then transmitted to speech interface card for speech output. Samples of synthesized speech by our text-to-speech system have been tested on subjects with satisfactory results. Evaluation of the system in intelligibility, comprehensibility and fluency has been conducted and an average of 96%, 95.9% and 75% respectively was reached.