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

Volume

14

Issue

4

fYear

2006

fDate

7/1/2006 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1137

Lastpage

1144

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;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1558-7916

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TASL.2006.876129

Filename

1643643