Abstract:

As speech technology matures to a level where it becomes practical for human-machine communication, much greater demands are now placed on the quality of the voice output. It is no longer sufficient to simply provide an understandable voice, communication demands an appropriate voice, of course, in the appropriate language, but also in the right style, and even particular identity.

This talk will present a series of work, that describes the basic processes involved in building synthetic voices. Over the past 10 years, we have developed core synthesis techniques, engines and tools to make the building process better defined and more successful. Using data-driven techniques, we have refined and optimized the processes of corpus-based synthesis itself, prompt selection, automatic labeling, lexicon construction, articulatory voice conversion and evaluation techniques. Our synthesizers, Festival and Flite, and the voices constructed with the FestVox tools have been used in a large number of speech applications, including: spoken dialog systems, speech-to-speech translation, and talking heads.

 Biography of the Speaker :

Alan W. Black is Associate Research Professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He earned a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. He has held several research positions at the University of
Edinburgh, Osaka University, Kyoto University and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr Black's research interests have covered many practical aspects of speech and language processing, including lexicons, morphology, language modeling, computational semantics, speech synthesis, spoken dialog systems and speech-to-speech translation. Dr Black remains a principal developer of University of Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System and releases code, scripts, databases, notes and slides on his work which is used in a number of speech courses throughout the world. Dr Black serves on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech Technical Committee, and is a reviewer
for major speech conferences. He is co-founder and Chief Scientist for Cepstral, a for-profit company for speech synthesis technology.

 

 

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