Development and integration of natural brazilian portuguese synthetic voices to framework FIVE

Abstract

The Framework FIVE is a multiplatform tool that assists the development of voice user interfaces applied in different technological environments. Several works have been carried out in order to provide increasingly in natural synthetic voices to FIVE, however, experiments realized with users has been reported the need for more friendly voices integrated to the framework. This paper describes the development and integration of natural synthetic voices in Brazilian Portuguese to the Framework FIVE. For this, a private audio and phonetics database were used on development of two voices (male and female) using the Unit Selection technique available on MaryTTS platform. For the integration process it was developed a specific web service. For comparison purposes, it was realized experiments to evaluate the naturalness and intelligibility of the voices, and the results obtained show that the constructed voices are more friendly, however, there is not a great difference when compared with HMM-based technique.