A Rule-Based Concatenative Approach to Speech Synthesis in Indian Language Text-to-Speech Systems

Author(s):  
Soumya Priyadarsini Panda ◽  
Ajit Kumar Nayak
1995 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Bachenko ◽  
Eileen Fitzpatrick ◽  
Jeffrey Daugherty

AbstractText-to-speech systems are currently designed to work on complete sentences and paragraphs, thereby allowing front end processors access to large amounts of linguistic context. Problems with this design arise when applications require text to be synthesized in near real time, as it is being typed. How does the system decide which incoming words should be collected and synthesized as a group when prior and subsequent word groups are unknown? We describe a rule-based parser that uses a three cell buffer and phrasing rules to identify break points for incoming text. Words up to the break point are synthesized as new text is moved into the buffer; no hierarchical structure is built beyond the lexical level. The parser was developed for use in a system that synthesizes written telecommunications by Deaf and hard of hearing people. These are texts written entirely in upper case, with little or no punctuation, and using a nonstandard variety of English (e.g. WHEN DO I WILL CALL BACK YOU). The parser performed well in a three month field trial utilizing tens of thousands of texts. Laboratory tests indicate that the parser exhibited a low error rate when compared with a human reader.


Author(s):  
Soumya Priyadarsini Panda ◽  
Ajit Kumar Nayak

This paper presents a novel technique for context based numeral reading in Indian language text to speech systems. The model uses a set of rules to determine the context of the numeral pronunciation and is being integrated with the waveform concatenation technique to produce speech out of the input text in Indian languages. For this purpose, the three Indian languages Odia, Hindi and Bengali are considered. To analyze the performance of the proposed technique, a set of experiments are performed considering different context of numeral pronunciations and the results are compared with existing syllable-based technique. The results obtained from different experiments shows the effectiveness of the proposed technique in producing intelligible speech out of the entered text utterances compared to the existing technique even with very less storage and execution time.


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soumya Priyadarsini Panda ◽  
Ajit Kumar Nayak ◽  
Srikanta Patnaik

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Stan ◽  
Beáta Lőrincz

This chapter introduces an overview of the current approaches for generating spoken content using text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) systems, and thus the voice of an Interactive Virtual Assistant (IVA). The overview builds upon the issues which make spoken content generation a non-trivial task, and introduces the two main components of a TTS system: text processing and acoustic modelling. It then focuses on providing the reader with the minimally required scientific details of the terminology and methods involved in speech synthesis, yet with sufficient knowledge so as to be able to make the initial decisions regarding the choice of technology for the vocal identity of the IVA. The speech synthesis methodologies’ description begins with the basic, easy to run, low-requirement rule-based synthesis, and ends up within the state-of-the-art deep learning landscape. To bring this extremely complex and extensive research field closer to commercial deployment, an extensive indexing of the readily and freely available resources and tools required to build a TTS system is provided. Quality evaluation methods and open research problems are, as well, highlighted at end of the chapter.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zofia Malisz ◽  
Gustav Eje Henter ◽  
Cassia Valentini-Botinhao ◽  
Oliver Watts ◽  
Jonas Beskow ◽  
...  

Decades of gradual advances in speech synthesis have recently culminated in exponential improvements fuelled by deep learning. This quantum leap has the potential to finally deliver realistic, controllable, and robust synthetic stimuli for speech experiments. In this article, we discuss these and other implications for phonetic sciences. We substantiate our argument by evaluating classic rule-based formant synthesis against state-of-the-art synthesisers on a) subjective naturalness ratings and b) a behavioural measure (reaction times in a lexical decision task). We also differentiate between text-to-speech and speech-to-speech methods. Naturalness ratings indicate that all modern systems are substantially closer to natural speech than formant synthesis. Reaction times for several modern systems do not differ substantially from natural speech, meaning that the processing gap observed in older systems, and reproduced with our formant synthesiser, is no longer evident. Importantly, some speech-to-speech methods are nearly indistinguishable from natural speech on both measures.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document