Speech corpus preparation for voice banking of laryngectomised patients

Abstract

This paper focuses on voice banking and creating personalised speech synthesis of laryngectomised patients who lose their voice after this radical surgery. Specific aspects of voice banking are discussed in the paper, including a description of the adjustments of the generic methods. The main attention is paid to the speech corpus building since the quality of synthesised speech depends a lot on the speech units variability and the number of their occurrences. Also some statistics and characteristics of the first experimental voices are presented and the possibility of using different speech synthesis methods depending on the voice quality and speech corpus size is pointed out.