Dramatic piece reader and it’s evaluation by the blind and sighted assessors

Abstract

This work builds on the work presented in [1]. It recalls the concept and realization of the intelligent audio-book reader for the visually handicapped. The system is capable of presenting different characters. The first version mimics the way how a puppeteer portrays different characters, i.e. only one voice talent was used for recording the speech databases in this concept and all the modifications were made using speech synthesis methods. The expressive speech databases are used to adapt the neutral voice to different levels of vocal effort. The architecture of the dramatic piece reader is explained and objective tests of the synthesizers are briefly discussed. The subjective evaluation was done by two groups of evaluators – one consisting of the blind and the second one of the sighted users.