ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999

From multilingual to polyglot speech synthesis

Christof Traber, Karl Huber, Karim Nedir, Beat Pfister, Eric Keller, Brigitte Zellner

This paper proposes a distinction between existing multilingual synthesis systems and mixed-lingual or polyglot synthesis systems. The latter should be capable of synthesising with the same voice utterances which contain foreign language words or word groups. As a first step towards polyglot synthetic speech, the design and realisation of a 4-lingual single-speaker diphone inventory is detailed. The first results show that mixed-lingual sentences can be synthesised using this inventory. Further work will focus on multilingual text analysis and prosodic modelling in order to create a complete polyglot TTS system.