Abstract
The paper presents a new TTS system for the Navarro-Lapurdian dialect based on a standard Basque TTS. A phonetically balanced recording corpus of 4000 sentences has been designed and two speakers have recorded it. The voice has been built using a high quality speech coder in the context of HMM based speech synthesis. The new dialectal TTS system has been compared in a subjective evaluation with the existing TTS system for standard Basque and with a mixed system that applies the phonetic transcription rules of the dialect, but uses the speech generation module of the standard Basque system. The adaptation of the front-end module with the inclusion of new phonetic transcription rules and new sounds is not enough to get a system that works better than the standard Basque system. The results with the dialectal new voice indicate that users prefer the new dialectal system to the standard Basque one.
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Navas, E., Hernaez, I., Erro, D., Salaberria, J., Oyharçabal, B., Padilla, M. (2014). Developing a Basque TTS for the Navarro-Lapurdian Dialect. In: Navarro Mesa, J.L., et al. Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8854. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_2
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