ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997

Designing a speaker adaptable formant-based text-to-speech system

Vassilios Darsinos, Dimitrios Galanis, George Kokkinakis

First results of the efforts to build a formant Text- to-Speech system, capable to change its characteristics and imitate a specific speaker's voice, are presented. The designing procedure is based on the automatic analysis of phonetically labelled utterances of the speaker, for the automatic extraction of formant values, voice source characteristics and coarticulation rules. All these parameters are necessary to control the synthesizer. The results of preliminary listening tests are encouraging, indicating that the system can serve as an efficient tool for the automatic analysis of speaker voice characteristics and speaker imitation.