ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997

Evaluation of speech synthesis systems for Dutch in tele-communication applications in GSM and PSTN networks

Toni Rietveld, Joop Kerkhoff, M. J. W. M. Emons, E.J. Meijer, Angelien A. Sanderman, Agaath M. C. Sluijter

In this contribution the subjective evaluation of three Text-To-Speech systems (two diphone and one allophone system) is reported in three'transmission conditions: standard telephone (PSTN) and GSM. The three TTS-systems realised three different texts: Travel information, Stock Exchange Reports and E-mail messages. The subjects had to carry out three tasks: a) to give preference judgements on the three TTS-systems and b) to rate the readings on 16 five-point scales. The rankorder on the scale of general quality was: Public Transport Stock Exchange E-mail reading, in both transmission conditions. The GSM-transmission tends to decrease the perceptual scores on a number of subjective scales, In the transliteration task significantly more errors were made in the GSM- condition than in the PSTN-condition. In both conditions less errors were made with the diphone TTS-systems than with the allophone system.