ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016

A Hierarchical Predictor of Synthetic Speech Naturalness Using Neural Networks

Takenori Yoshimura, Gustav Eje Henter, Oliver Watts, Mirjam Wester, Junichi Yamagishi, Keiichi Tokuda

A problem when developing and tuning speech synthesis systems is that there is no well-established method of automatically rating the quality of the synthetic speech. This research attempts to obtain a new automated measure which is trained on the result of large-scale subjective evaluations employing many human listeners, i.e., the Blizzard Challenge. To exploit the data, we experiment with linear regression, feed-forward and convolutional neural network models, and combinations of them to regress from synthetic speech to the perceptual scores obtained from listeners. The biggest improvements were seen when combining stimulus- and system-level predictions.