Some aspects of ASR transcription based unsupervised speaker adaptation for HMM speech synthesis

Abstract

Statistical parametric synthesis offers numerous techniques to create new voices. Speaker adaptation is one of the most exciting ones. However, it still requires high quality audio data with low signal to noise ration and precise labeling. This paper presents an automatic speech recognition based unsupervised adaptation method for Hidden Markov Model (HMM) speech synthesis and its quality evaluation. The adaptation technique automatically controls the number of phone mismatches. The evaluation involves eight different HMM voices, including supervised and unsupervised speaker adaptation. The effects of segmentation and linguistic labeling errors in adaptation data are also investigated. The results show that unsupervised adaptation can contribute to speeding up the creation of new HMM voices with comparable quality to supervised adaptation. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.