Definition
Over the last decade, speech synthesis, the technology that enables machines to talk to humans, has become so natural sounding that a naïve listener might assume that he/she is listening to a recording of a live human speaker. Speech synthesis is not new; indeed, it took several decades to arrive where it is today. Originally starting from the idea of using physics-based models of the vocal tract, it took many years of research to perfect the encapsulation of the acoustic properties of the vocal tract as a “black box,” using so-called formant synthesizers. Then, with the help of ever more powerful computing technology, it became viable to use snippets of recorded speech directly and glue them together to create new sentences in the form of concatenative synthesizers. Combining this idea with now available methods for fast search, potentially millions of choices are evaluated to find the optimal...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
J. Schroeter, Basic principles of speech synthesis, in Springer Handbook of Speech Processing and Communication, chap. 19, ed. by J. Benesty (Springer, Berlin, 2008)
J.L. Bader, Presidents as pitchmen, and posthumous play-by-play, commentary. New York Times, 9 Aug 2001
J. van Santen, R. Sproat, J. Olive, J. Hirschberg (eds.) Progress in Speech Synthesis, section III (Springer, New York, 1997)
J.N. Holmes, Research report formant synthesizers: cascade or parallel? Speech Commun. 2 (4), 251–273 (1983)
R. Sproat, (ed.), Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis. The Bell Labs Approach (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1998)
A. Hunt, A.W. Black, Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database, in Proceedings of the ICASSP-96, Atlanta, 1996, pp. 373–376
G.D. Forney, The viterbi algorithm. Proc. IEEE 61 (3), 268–278 (1973)
T. Dutoit, Corpus-based speech synthesis, in Springer Handbook of Speech Processing and Communication, chap. 21, ed. by J. Benesty (Springer, Berlin, 2008)
J. van Santen, Prosodic processing, in Springer Handbook of Speech Processing and Communication, chap. 23, ed. by J. Benesty (Springer, Berlin, 2008)
E. Cosatto, H.P. Graf, J. Ostermann, J. Schroeter, From audio-only to audio and video text-to-speech. Acta Acust. 90, 1084–1095 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Schroeter, J., Conkie, A. (2014). Voice Sample Synthesis. In: Li, S., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27733-7_6-3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27733-7_6-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27733-7
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering