Abstract
This paper gives an overview of the design and development of an experimental restricted domain corpus-based unit selection text-to-speech (TTS) system for Hungarian. The experimental system generates weather forecasts in Hungarian. 5260 sentences were recorded creating a speech corpus containing 11 hours of continuous speech. A Hungarian speech recognizer was applied to label speech sound boundaries. Word boundaries were also marked automatically. The unit selection follows a top-down hierarchical scheme using words and speech sounds as units. A simple prosody model is used, based on the relative position of words within a prosodic phrase. The quality of the system was compared to two earlier Hungarian TTS systems. A subjective listening test was performed by 221 listeners. The experimental system scored 3.92 on a five-point mean opinion score (MOS) scale. The earlier unit concatenation TTS system scored 2.63, the formant synthesizer scored 1.24, and natural speech scored 4.86.
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Fék, M., Pesti, P., Németh, G., Zainkó, C., Olaszy, G. (2006). Corpus-Based Unit Selection TTS for Hungarian. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4188. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11846406_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11846406_46
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