Multiple fo contour parallel Viterbi search for unit selection speech synthesis

Unit selection speech systems generate synthetic speech by concatenation of acoustic units that are chosen by means of a Viterbi search on a previously recorded corpus of the same speaker. Given the finite nature of the corpus, there is usually a trade-off between the acoustic quality of the signal, and the quality of the prosody. Proposed is a parallel Viterbi search considering multiple intonation contours that improves at the same time both acoustic quality and intonation, while maintaining the computational efficiency of the process.