Unit selection without a phoneme set

With most human languages having less than 1 million speakers it is unlikely that standard commercial systems will be able to justify supporting the vast majority of so-called "minority" languages. In our continuing task of providing tools for building synthetic voices in currently unsupported languages, this paper describes a number of experiments in building synthetic voices without requiring specific phonetic knowledge of the target languages. Even when a language is well studied defining an appropriate phoneme set is never easy. The work presented here shows the adequacy of unit selection synthesis techniques when no explicit phoneme set is available.