ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999

Interaction of units in a unit selection database

Mark Beutnagel, Alistair Conkie

The purpose of this paper is to examine some aspects of unit selection for Text to Speech synthesis (TTS). We use Unit Selection as described in [2],[3]. The approach taken was to synthesize a large number of sentences and capture information about the selected units. We used approximately 25 million phonemes resulting from 10,000 files of AP newswire text. Given these statistics we looked at the units selected in order to try to analyse how unit selection works from a statistical point of view. Results of our analysis are presented.