Rule-Based Speech Synthesis

Abstract

In this chapter, we review some of the issues in rule-based synthesis and specifically discuss formant synthesis. Formant synthesis and the theory behind have played an important role in both the scientific progress in understanding how humans talk and also the development of the first speech technology applications. Its flexibility and small footprint makes the approach still of interest and a valuable complement to the current dominant methods based on concatenative data-driven synthesis. As already mentioned in the overview by Schroeter (Chap. 19) we also see a new trend to combine the rule-based and data-driven approaches. Formant features from a database that can be used both to optimize a rule-based formant synthesis system and to optimize the search for good units in a concatenative system.