Wael Hamza

Recent improvements to the IBM trainable speech synthesis system

In this paper we describe the current status of the trainable text-to-speech system at IBM. Recent algorithmic and database changes to the system have led to significant gains in the output quality. On the algorithms side, we have introduced statistical models for predicting pitch and duration targets which replace the rule-based target generation previously employed. Additionally, we have changed the cost function and the search strategy, introduced a post-search pitch smoothing algorithm, and improved our method of preselection. Through the combined data and algorithmic contributions, we have been able to significantly improve (p < 0.0001) the mean opinion score (MOS) of our female voice, from 3.68 to 4.85 when heard over loudspeakers and to 5.42 when heard over the telephone (seven point scale).

Quantitative method for modeling context in concatenative synthesis using large speech database

Modeling phonetic context is one of the key points to get natural sounding in concatenativc speech synthesis. In this paper, a new quantitative method to model context is proposed. In the proposed method, the context is measured as the distance between leafs of the top-down likelihood-based decision trees that have been grown during the construction of acoustic inventory. Unlike other context modeling methods, this method allows the unit selection algorithm to borrow unit occurrences from other contexts when their context distances are close. This is done by incorporating the measured distance as an element in the unit selection cost function. The motivation behind this method is that it reduces the required speech modification by using better unit occurrences from near context. This method also makes it easy to use long synthesis units, e.g. syllables or words, in the same unit selection framework.