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Czech Expressive Speech Synthesis in Limited Domain

Comparison of Unit Selection and HMM-Based Approaches

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Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7499))

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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.

This research was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. TA01011264 and by the grant of the University of West Bohemia, project No. SGS-2010-054. The access to the MetaCentrum computing facilities provided under the programme “Projects of Large Infrastructure for Research, Development, and Innovations” LM2010005 funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic is highly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic

    Martin Grůber & Zdeněk Hanzlíček

Authors
  1. Martin Grůber
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  2. Zdeněk Hanzlíček
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Department of Computer Graphics and Design, Masaryk University, Botanická 68a, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Sojka

  2. Faculty of Informatics, Department of Information Technologies, Masaryk University, Botanická 68a, 602 00, Brno, Czech Republic

    Aleš Horák , Ivan Kopeček  & Karel Pala ,  & 

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Grůber, M., Hanzlíček, Z. (2012). Czech Expressive Speech Synthesis in Limited Domain. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7499. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32790-2_80

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32790-2_80

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32789-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32790-2

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