An evaluation of automatic phone segmentation for concatenative speech synthesis

Author

Kawai, Hisashi ; Toda, Tomoki

Author_Institution

ATR Spoken Language Translation Res. Labs., Japan

Volume

1

fYear

2004

fDate

17-21 May 2004

Abstract

This paper studies the performance of automatic phone segmentation from two viewpoints: temporal precision and the effect on the naturalness of synthetic speech. The absolute error of the phone onset time for the best 90% and worst 10% were 4.6 ms and 25.9 ms, respectively. These values are comparable to discrepancies among human labelers. As the result of perception tests in which naturalness was pair-compared between synthetic speeches generated from hand-segmented data and from auto-segmented data, it was found that the latter is statistically inferior.

Keywords

hidden Markov models; speech processing; speech synthesis; 25.9 ms; 4.6 ms; HMM; TTS; acoustic analysis; auto-segmented data; automatic phone segmentation; concatenative speech synthesis; hand-segmented data; hidden Markov models; linguistic analysis; natural synthetic speech; perception tests; phone onset time error; segmented speech corpora; temporal precision; text to speech synthesis; Automatic testing; Context modeling; Costs; Degradation; Hidden Markov models; Humans; Laboratories; Natural languages; Speech synthesis; Synthesizers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2004. Proceedings. (ICASSP '04). IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8484-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.2004.1326076

Filename

1326076