Building Synthetic Voices

Alan W Black and Kevin A. Lenzo
awb@cs.cmu.edu and lenzo@cs.cmu.edu

This tutorial will give an overview of the basic techniques available for building synthetic voices for speech synthesis systems, including an actual example of voice building.

The first part will describe the basic components of a speech synthesis system covering the state of the art techniques used within them. Specifically:

 

The second part will describe the basic stages required in building new synthetic voices (in English or other languages):

 

This tutorial is based on the techniques, documentation and tools freely distributed through CMU's FestVox project (http://festvox.org/ ) leading to voices that can be run on Edinburgh University's Festival Speech Synthesis System.