ISCA Archive ISCSLP 2006
ISCA Archive ISCSLP 2006

An Initial System for Integrated Synthesis of Mandarin, Min-nan, and Hakka Speech

Hung-Yan Gu, Yan-Zuo Zhou, Huang-Liang Liau

In this study, an integrated speech synthesis system is initially built to synthesize Mandarin, Min-nan, and Hakka speeches. By integration, only a model trained with Min-nan sentences is used to generate pitch-contours for the three languages, same rules are used to generate syllable duration and amplitude values, and a same program module implementing the method, TIPW, is used to synthesize the three languages’ speech waveforms. Also, each syllable of a language has just one recorded signal waveform, i.e. no chance of unit selection. Under such a restricted situation, the synthetic speech signals still have a noticeable level of naturalness and signal clarity. Keywords: cross-lingual speech synthesis, pitch contour, TIPW.