Towards automatic audio track generation for Czech TV broadcasting: Initial experiments with subtitles-to-speech synthesis

In this paper, the project ldquoElimination of the Language Barriers Faced by the Handicapped Watchers of the Czech Televisionrdquo aimed at making Czech TV broadcasting available to a broader group of TV watchers is introduced. More specifically, the problems of the automatic audio track generation within the project are mentioned. As the audio track will be produced from subtitles, text-to-speech (TTS) technology will be utilised. Several versions of a TTS system planned to produce the audio track are described. In this paper, the main attention is paid to the analysis of synchronicity between subtitles and the synthetic speech. Problems with fitting synthetic speech into the predefined subtitles slots were revealed - for more than 44% of all subtitles, the synthetic speech overlapped the slots. So, great care will have to be taken to produce speech af faster rates when customising our TTS system for the task of generating audio tracks from subtitles.