Taking advantage of pronunciation variation in unit selection speech synthesis for polish

The paper presents how to take advantage of pronunciation variation when constructing a speech synthesis system for Polish, so that even a small speech corpus can be sufficient to produce intelligible and good quality speech. The system uses a unit selection algorithm based directly on linguistic features of the input text, without using a prosody model. Proposed target and concatenation cost functions are described. Results of intelligibility tests and cost comparison between canonical and best selected pronunciation variant are presented. They show that for a small corpus using pronunciation variation modeling can increase effectiveness of unit selection.