ISCA Archive ECST 1987
ISCA Archive ECST 1987

Improving text-to-speech conversion in Spanish: linguistic analysis and prosody

José M. Pardo, M. Martinez, A. Quilis, Elias Munoz-Merino

In order to improve the naturalness of a text to speech converter for Spanish, a study has been carried out to establish the possibility of designing an algorithm that generates automatically realistic pauses emulating the mechanism that a speaker uses to read a text. Together with it a study on the intonation for Spanish has been carried out to devise a good pitch generator. In this paper an interim report about an automatic pause generator and a pitch generator that we are currently developing is described. The pause generator is based on an automatic word labeler and empirical rules obtained from a database analysis.