Czech expressive speech synthesis in limited domain: Comparison of unit selection and HMM-based approaches

Abstract

This paper deals with expressive speech synthesis in a limited domain restricted to conversations between humans and a computer on a given topic. Two different methods (unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis) were employed to produce expressive synthetic speech, both with the same description of expressivity by so-called communicative functions. Such a discrete division is related to our limited domain and it is not intended to be a general solution for expressivity description. Resulting synthetic speech was presented to listeners within a web-based listening test to evaluate whether the expressivity is perceived as expected. The comparison of both methods is also shown. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.