Expressive speech synthesis for urgent warning messages generation in Romani and Slovak

Abstract

Warnings generated by a specially designed speech synthesizer can be used to inform, warn, instruct and navigate people in dangerous and critical situations. The paper presents the design of the speech synthesizer capable of generating warning messages with different urgency levels in Slovak and also in Romani - the under-resourced and digitally endangered language of the Slovak Roma. An original three-step method is proposed for creating expressive speech databases. Expressive synthesizers trained on these databases and capable of generating Romani and Slovak synthetic warning speech and messages in three levels of urgency are presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.