ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009

Towards intonation control in unit selection speech synthesis

Cédric Boidin, Olivier Boeffard, Thierry Moudenc, Géraldine Damnati

We propose to control intonation in unit selection speech synthesis with a mixed CART-HMM intonation model. The Finite State Machine (FSM) formulation is suited to incorporate the intonation model in the unit selection framework because it allows for combination of models with different unit types and handling competing intonative variants. Subjective experiments have been carried out to compare segmental and joint-prosodic-and-segmental unit selection.