• Title/Summary/Keyword: text-to-speech system

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Design and Implementation of a Text-to Speech System using the Prosody and Duration Information (운율 및 길이 정보를 이용한 무제한 음성 합성기의 설계 및 구현)

  • Yang, Jin-Seok;Kim, Jae-Beom;Lee, Jeong-Hyeon
    • The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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    • v.3 no.5
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    • pp.1121-1129
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    • 1996
  • To produce more natural speech in a Text-to-Speech system, the processing of the prosody and duration must be processing in advance, and then extracted the prosody and duration information by means of trial-and-error experiments. In this paper, a method is proposed to improve the naturalness in a Text-to Speech system using this information. As the results, the Text-to-Speech system proposed and implemented in this paper showed more natural speech synthesis than the systems, which do not use this information, did.

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Control of Duration Model Parameters in HMM-based Korean Speech Synthesis (HMM 기반의 한국어 음성합성에서 지속시간 모델 파라미터 제어)

  • Kim, Il-Hwan;Bae, Keun-Sung
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.15 no.4
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    • pp.97-105
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    • 2008
  • Nowadays an HMM-based text-to-speech system (HTS) has been very widely studied because it needs less memory and low computation complexity and is suitable for embedded systems in comparison with a corpus-based unit concatenation text-to-speech one. It also has the advantage that voice characteristics and the speaking rate of the synthetic speech can be converted easily by modifying HMM parameters appropriately. We implemented an HMM-based Korean text-to-speech system using a small size Korean speech DB and proposes a method to increase the naturalness of the synthetic speech by controlling duration model parameters in the HMM-based Korean text-to speech system. We performed a paired comparison test to verify that theses techniques are effective. The test result with the preference scores of 73.8% has shown the improvement of the naturalness of the synthetic speech through controlling the duration model parameters.

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An end-to-end synthesis method for Korean text-to-speech systems (한국어 text-to-speech(TTS) 시스템을 위한 엔드투엔드 합성 방식 연구)

  • Choi, Yeunju;Jung, Youngmoon;Kim, Younggwan;Suh, Youngjoo;Kim, Hoirin
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.10 no.1
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    • pp.39-48
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    • 2018
  • A typical statistical parametric speech synthesis (text-to-speech, TTS) system consists of separate modules, such as a text analysis module, an acoustic modeling module, and a speech synthesis module. This causes two problems: 1) expert knowledge of each module is required, and 2) errors generated in each module accumulate passing through each module. An end-to-end TTS system could avoid such problems by synthesizing voice signals directly from an input string. In this study, we implemented an end-to-end Korean TTS system using Google's Tacotron, which is an end-to-end TTS system based on a sequence-to-sequence model with attention mechanism. We used 4392 utterances spoken by a Korean female speaker, an amount that corresponds to 37% of the dataset Google used for training Tacotron. Our system obtained mean opinion score (MOS) 2.98 and degradation mean opinion score (DMOS) 3.25. We will discuss the factors which affected training of the system. Experiments demonstrate that the post-processing network needs to be designed considering output language and input characters and that according to the amount of training data, the maximum value of n for n-grams modeled by the encoder should be small enough.

Building an Exceptional Pronunciation Dictionary For Korean Automatic Pronunciation Generator (한국어 자동 발음열 생성을 위한 예외발음사전 구축)

  • Kim, Sun-Hee
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.10 no.4
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    • pp.167-177
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    • 2003
  • This paper presents a method of building an exceptional pronunciation dictionary for Korean automatic pronunciation generator. An automatic pronunciation generator is an essential element of speech recognition system and a TTS (Text-To-Speech) system. It is composed of a part of regular rules and an exceptional pronunciation dictionary. The exceptional pronunciation dictionary is created by extracting the words which have exceptional pronunciations from text corpus based on the characteristics of the words of exceptional pronunciation through phonological research and text analysis. Thus, the method contributes to improve performance of Korean automatic pronunciation generator as well as the performance of speech recognition system and TTS system.

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A new approach technique on Speech-to-Speech Translation (신호의 복원된 위상 공간을 이용한 오디오 상황 인지)

  • Le, Thanh Hien;Lee, Sung-young;Lee, Young-Koo
    • Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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    • 2009.11a
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    • pp.239-240
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    • 2009
  • We live in a flat world in which globalization fosters communication, travel, and trade among more than 150 countries and thousands of languages. To surmount the barriers among these languages, translation is required; Speech-to-Speech translation will automate the process. Thanks to recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT), and Text-to-Speech (TTS), one can now utilize a system to translate a speech of source language to a speech of target language and vice versa in affordable manner. The three phase process establishes that the source speech be transcribed into a (set of) text of the source language (ASR) before the source text is translated into the target text (MT). Finally, the target speech is synthesized from the target text (TTS).

Implementation of Music Broadcasting Service System in the Shopping Center Using Text-To-Speech Technology (TTS를 이용한 매장 음악 방송 서비스 시스템 구현)

  • Chang, Moon-Soo;Kang, Sun-Mee
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.14 no.4
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    • pp.169-178
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    • 2007
  • This thesis describes the development of a service system for small-sized shops which support not only music broadcasting, but editing and generating voice announcement using the TTS(Text-To-Speech) technology. The system has been developed based on web environments with an easy access whenever and wherever it is needed. The system is able to control the sound using silverlight media player based on the ASP .NET 2.0 technology without any additional application software. Use of the Ajax control allows for multiple users to get the maximum load when needed. TTS is built in the server side so that the service can be provided without user's computer. Due to convenience and usefulness of the system, the business sector can provide better service to many shops. Further additional functions such as statistical analysis will undoubtedly help shop management provide desirable services.

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A 3D Audio-Visual Animated Agent for Expressive Conversational Question Answering

  • Martin, J.C.;Jacquemin, C.;Pointal, L.;Katz, B.
    • 한국정보컨버전스학회:학술대회논문집
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    • 2008.06a
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    • pp.53-56
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    • 2008
  • This paper reports on the ACQA(Animated agent for Conversational Question Answering) project conducted at LIMSI. The aim is to design an expressive animated conversational agent(ACA) for conducting research along two main lines: 1/ perceptual experiments(eg perception of expressivity and 3D movements in both audio and visual channels): 2/ design of human-computer interfaces requiring head models at different resolutions and the integration of the talking head in virtual scenes. The target application of this expressive ACA is a real-time question and answer speech based system developed at LIMSI(RITEL). The architecture of the system is based on distributed modules exchanging messages through a network protocol. The main components of the system are: RITEL a question and answer system searching raw text, which is able to produce a text(the answer) and attitudinal information; this attitudinal information is then processed for delivering expressive tags; the text is converted into phoneme, viseme, and prosodic descriptions. Audio speech is generated by the LIMSI selection-concatenation text-to-speech engine. Visual speech is using MPEG4 keypoint-based animation, and is rendered in real-time by Virtual Choreographer (VirChor), a GPU-based 3D engine. Finally, visual and audio speech is played in a 3D audio and visual scene. The project also puts a lot of effort for realistic visual and audio 3D rendering. A new model of phoneme-dependant human radiation patterns is included in the speech synthesis system, so that the ACA can move in the virtual scene with realistic 3D visual and audio rendering.

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Chinese Prosody Generation Based on C-ToBI Representation for Text-to-Speech (음성합성을 위한 C-ToBI기반의 중국어 운율 경계와 F0 contour 생성)

  • Kim, Seung-Won;Zheng, Yu;Lee, Gary-Geunbae;Kim, Byeong-Chang
    • MALSORI
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    • no.53
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    • pp.75-92
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    • 2005
  • Prosody Generation Based on C-ToBI Representation for Text-to-SpeechSeungwon Kim, Yu Zheng, Gary Geunbae Lee, Byeongchang KimProsody modeling is critical in developing text-to-speech (TTS) systems where speech synthesis is used to automatically generate natural speech. In this paper, we present a prosody generation architecture based on Chinese Tone and Break Index (C-ToBI) representation. ToBI is a multi-tier representation system based on linguistic knowledge to transcribe events in an utterance. The TTS system which adopts ToBI as an intermediate representation is known to exhibit higher flexibility, modularity and domain/task portability compared with the direct prosody generation TTS systems. However, the cost of corpus preparation is very expensive for practical-level performance because the ToBI labeled corpus has been manually constructed by many prosody experts and normally requires a large amount of data for accurate statistical prosody modeling. This paper proposes a new method which transcribes the C-ToBI labels automatically in Chinese speech. We model Chinese prosody generation as a classification problem and apply conditional Maximum Entropy (ME) classification to this problem. We empirically verify the usefulness of various natural language and phonology features to make well-integrated features for ME framework.

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Text to Speech System from Web Images (웹상의 영상 내의 문자 인식과 음성 전환 시스템)

  • 안희임;정기철
    • Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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    • 2001.06c
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    • pp.5-8
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    • 2001
  • The computer programs based upon graphic user interface(GUI) became commonplace with the advance of computer technology. Nevertheless, programs for the visually-handicapped have still remained at the level of TTS(text to speech) programs and this prevents many visually-handicapped from enjoying the pleasure and convenience of the information age. This paper is, paying attention to the importance of character recognition in images, about the configuration of the system that converts text in the image selected by a user to the speech by extracting the character part, and carrying out character recognition.

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PROSODY CONTROL BASED ON SYNTACTIC INFORMATION IN KOREAN TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERSION SYSTEM

  • Kim, Yeon-Jun;Oh, Yung-Hwan
    • Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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    • 1994.06a
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    • pp.937-942
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    • 1994
  • Text-to-Speech(TTS) conversion system can convert any words or sentences into speech. To synthesize the speech like human beings do, careful prosody control including intonation, duration, accent, and pause is required. It helps listeners to understand the speech clearly and makes the speech sound more natural. In this paper, a prosody control scheme which makes use of the information of the function word is proposed. Among many factors of prosody, intonation, duration, and pause are closely related to syntactic structure, and their relations have been formalized and embodied in TTS. To evaluate the synthesized speech with the proposed prosody control, one of the subjective evaluation methods-MOS(Mean Opinion Score) method has been used. Synthesized speech has been tested on 10 listeners and each listener scored the speech between 1 and 5. Through the evaluation experiments, it is observed that the proposed prosody control helps TTS system synthesize the more natural speech.

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