Globally Optimal Training of Unit Boundaries in Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis

The level of quality that can be achieved by modern concatenative text-to-speech synthesis heavily depends on a judicious composition of the unit inventory used in the unit selection process. Unit boundary optimization, in particular, can make a huge difference in the users´ perception of the concatenated acoustic waveform. This paper considers the iterative refinement of unit boundaries based on a data-driven feature extraction framework separately optimized for each boundary region. This guarantees a globally optimal cut point between any two matching units in the underlying inventory. The associated boundary training procedure is objectively characterized, first in terms of convergence behavior, and then by comparing the distributions in inter-unit discontinuity obtained before and after training. Experimental results underscore the viability of this approach for unit boundary optimization. Listening evidence also qualitatively exemplifies a noticeable reduction in the perception of discontinuity between concatenated acoustic units