ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006

Text-independent cross-language voice conversion

David Sündermann, Harald Höge, Antonio Bonafonte, Hermann Ney, Julia Hirschberg

So far, cross-language voice conversion requires at least one bilingual speaker and parallel speech data to perform the training. This paper shows how these obstacles can be overcome by means of a recently presented text-independent training method based on unit selection. The new method is evaluated in the framework of the European speech-to-speech translation project TC-Star and achieves a performance similar to that of text-dependent intra-lingual voice conversion.