Speaker similarity evaluation of foreign-accented speech synthesis using HMM-based speaker adaptation

This paper describes a speaker discrimination experiment in which native English listeners were presented with natural and synthetic speech stimuli in English and were asked to judge whether they thought the sentences were spoken by the same person or not. The natural speech consisted of recordings of Finnish speakers speaking English. The synthetic stimuli were created using adaptation data from the same Finnish speakers. Two average voice models were compared: one trained on Finnish-accented English and the other on American-accented English. The experiments illustrate that listeners perform well at speaker discrimination when the stimuli are both natural or both synthetic, but when the speech types are crossed performance drops significantly. We also found that the type of accent in the average voice model had no effect on the listeners´ speaker discrimination performance.