Title :
Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications
Author :
Theune, Mariët ; Meijs, Koen ; Heylen, Dirk ; Ordelman, Roeland
Author_Institution :
Human Media Interaction Group, Univ. of Twente, Enschede
fDate :
7/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
Work on expressive speech synthesis has long focused on the expression of basic emotions. In recent years, however, interest in other expressive styles has been increasing. The research presented in this paper aims at the generation of a storytelling speaking style, which is suitable for storytelling applications and more in general, for applications aimed at children. Based on an analysis of human storytellers\´ speech, we designed and implemented a set of prosodic rules for converting "neutral" speech, as produced by a text-to-speech system, into storytelling speech. An evaluation of our storytelling speech generation system showed encouraging results
Keywords :
speech synthesis; basic emotions expression; expressive speech generation; expressive speech synthesis; prosodic rules; storytelling approach; storytelling speech generation system; text-to-speech system; Application software; Humans; Intelligent agent; Natural languages; Performance analysis; Speech analysis; Speech processing; Speech synthesis; Child-directed speech; expressive prosody; expressive speech; speech analysis; speech synthesis;
Journal_Title :
Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TASL.2006.876129
