ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

The prosodizer - automatic prosodic annotations of speech synthesis databases

Norbert Braunschweiler

Prosodic annotations are used for locating and characterizing prominent parts in utterances as well as identifying and describing boundaries of coherent stretches of speech. In speech synthesis prosodic annotations can be used to improve the unit selection process and subsequently yield more natural sounding synthesis. A method for automatic prosodic annotations of speech is described in this paper. This method is implemented in a computer program called Prosodizer that integrates acoustic features of F0 and RMS as well as syntactic and segmental information like POS tags and syllable boundaries. Design and preliminary performance results are described.