ISCA Archive Blizzard 2008
ISCA Archive Blizzard 2008

Statistical Speech Synthesis for the Blizzard Challenge 2008

Pieter Scholtz, Albert Visagie, Johan du Preez

In this paper we present the details of our first entry for the Blizzard Challenge 2008 speech synthesis evaluation. Our system is a new HMM-based text-to-speech voice building system for the HTS runtime synthesis engine. We entered two UK English voices, one built from the full database provided, A, the other from the Arctic subset, B and one Mandarin voice built from the provided database. The evaluation results show that our system provides very good intelligibility, moderate naturalness and low similarity to the original speaker.