Speech synthesis using approximate matching of syllables

In this paper we propose a technique for a syllable based speech synthesis system. While syllable based synthesizers produce better sounding speech than diphone and phone, the coverage of all syllables is a non-trivial issue. We address the issue of coverage of syllables through approximating the syllable when the required syllable is not found. To verify our hypothesis, we conducted perceptual studies on manually modified sentences and found that our assumption is valid. Similar approaches have been used in speech synthesis and it shows that such approximation produces intelligible and better quality speech than diphone units.