Prosody modeling for an embedded TTS system implementation

Prosody quality strongly influences the intelligibility and the perceived naturalness of synthetic speech. But despite the significant progress in prosody modeling from the last years, incomplete linguistic knowledge that can be derived from text and various language-specific issues still limit the quality of today´s commercial text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Moreover, obtaining a right pronunciation and intonation for embedded speech applications that have severe resource constraints, is a more challenging task. The paper describes an enhanced version of an embedded TTS system in Romanian language and proposes and discusses an efficient rule-based intonation model for prosody generation. Informal listening tests show that highly intelligible and fair natural synthetic speech can be produced with small memory footprint and low computational resources.