Prosody generation by integrating rule and template-based approaches for emotional Malay speech synthesis

This paper presents a hybrid technique to enhance the quality of the rule-based approach to generate prosody for Malay speech synthesis by integrating prosody parametric manipulation with template parametric manipulation so as to increase the intonation variability of the synthesized output. Basically the prosodic features of the neutral synthesized speech are manipulated in an attempt to express the four basic emotions, namely happiness, anger, sadness and fear. We also present an objective methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of the synthesized output to generate the appropriate prosody in order to confirm the subjective perception tests.