Text-to-speech system for Brazilian Portuguese using a reduced set of synthesis units

Author

Solewicz, J.A. ; Moraes, J.A. ; Alcaim, A.

Author_Institution

CETUC-PUC/Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

fYear

1994

fDate

13-16 Apr 1994

Firstpage

579

Abstract

An unrestricted text-to-speech synthesis system for Brazilian Portuguese is presented. The system is based on concatenation by rules of basic speech units. A reduced set of speech units (149) is proposed. This set comprises mostly consonant-oral vowel (CV) transitions, which represent crucial acoustic segments in the speech production process. The authors show that using this inventory of units it is possible to synthesize highly intelligible speech for Brazilian Portuguese. A CELP model is used as compression and synthesis structure

Keywords

data compression; linear predictive coding; natural languages; speech coding; speech synthesis; Brazilian Portuguese; CELP model; acoustic segments; basic speech units; compression structure; concatenation; consonant-oral vowel transitions; intelligible speech; speech production; synthesis structure; synthesis units reduced set; unrestricted text-to-speech synthesis system; Bit rate; Databases; Degradation; Encoding; Man machine systems; Speech processing; Speech recognition; Speech synthesis; Synthesizers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Speech, Image Processing and Neural Networks, 1994. Proceedings, ISSIPNN '94., 1994 International Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-1865-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SIPNN.1994.344845

Filename

344845