Presentation 2007/11/28
Development of a Bilingual Speech Synthesis System for a Japanese ALS Patient
Shimpei Kajima, Akemi Iida, Keiichi Yasu, Takayuki Arai,
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Abstract(in English) This study aimed to build a bilingual speech synthesis system for a communication aid for a Japanese amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient. A corpus-based speech synthesis method is ideal for a communication aid for people anticipating the loss of their voice since the synthetic speech made by such method can reflect the speaker's voice quality. However, this system needs a recording of a large amount of speech that is a burden for them. This paper first describes about our work on building an English speech synthesis system with the patient's voice using a corpus-based speech synthesis method with a voice conversion technique that requires smaller amount of speaker's recordings. After that, we report on our ongoing project of developing a HMM-based Japanese speech synthesis system using HTS, a modified version of HTK. The first method synthesizes speech with HTS and the acoustic model made from the recordings of the patient's voice. The second method synthesizes speech with HTS and the acoustic model with the voice quality which was converted to the patient's voice using voice conversion technique which requires fewer burdens to the patients. The result of the perceptual experiment showed that the voice synthesized with latter method was perceived to have a closer voice quality to the patient's natural speech.
Keyword(in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Keyword(in English) a bilingual communication aid / speech synthesis / corpus-based / HMM / voice conversion
Paper # WIT2007-36
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Conference Information
Committee WIT
Conference Date 2007/11/28(1days)
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Registration To Well-being Information Technology(WIT)
Language JPN
Title (in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Sub Title (in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Title (in English) Development of a Bilingual Speech Synthesis System for a Japanese ALS Patient
Sub Title (in English)
Keyword(1) a bilingual communication aid
Keyword(2) speech synthesis
Keyword(3) corpus-based
Keyword(4) HMM
Keyword(5) voice conversion
1st Author's Name Shimpei Kajima
1st Author's Affiliation Sophia University()
2nd Author's Name Akemi Iida
2nd Author's Affiliation Tokyo University of Technology
3rd Author's Name Keiichi Yasu
3rd Author's Affiliation Sophia University
4th Author's Name Takayuki Arai
4th Author's Affiliation Sophia University
Date 2007/11/28
Paper # WIT2007-36
Volume (vol) vol.107
Number (no) 368
Page pp.pp.-
#Pages 6
Date of Issue