Multimodal Speech Synthesis

Abstract

Summary: Speech output generation in the SmartKom system is realized by a corpus-based unit selection strategy that preserves many properties of the human voice. When the system's avatar "Smartakus" is present on the screen, the synthetic speech signal is temporally synchronized with Smartakus visible speech gestures and prosodically adjusted to his pointing gestures to enhance multimodal communication. The unit selection voice was formally evaluated and found to be very well accepted and reasonably intelligible in SmartKom- specific scenarios.