Synthesising expressive speech – which synthesiser for vocas?

Abstract

In the context of people with complex communication needs who depend on Voice Output Communication Aids, the ability of speech synthesisers to convey not only sentences, but also emotions would be a great enrichment. The latter is essential and very natural in interpersonal speech communication. Hence, we are interested in the expressiveness of speech synthesisers and their perception. We present the results of a study in which 82 participants listened to different synthesised sentences with different emotional contours from three synthesisers. We found that participants’ ratings on expressiveness and naturalness indicate that the synthesiser CereVoice performs better than the other synthesisers.