Improved duration control for speech synthesis using a multigram language model

Speech synthesis systems based on concatenation of segments derived from natural speech are very intelligible and achieve a high overall quality. Even though listeners often complain about wrong or missing temporal structure and timing in synthetic speech. We propose a new approach for duration control in speech synthesis that uses the probability of a word in its context to control the local speaking rate within the utterance. This idea bases on the observation that words that are very likely to occur in a given context are pronounced less accurate and faster than improbable ones. In this paper we introduce an algorithm that implements the duration control using a multigram language model and will present first experimental results.