Automatic voice building for flexible speech synthesis

随着大型语音数据库的不断增加，人们可以通过应用统计学习算法来构建语音合成系统，这被称为数据驱动或基于语料库的方法。这些系统可以自动训练，不仅可以生成自然和高质量的合成语音，而且可以再现原始说话人的语音特征。然而，为了使整个语音构建过程完全自动化，我们需要以自动的方式构建语音数据库。在这项研究工作中，我们研究了自动语音建设技术的HMM为基础的语音合成系统，可以合成语音与各种语音质量。首先，我们实现了一个基于GUI的标签工具，称为PLEd（韵律和语言标签编辑器）。然后，为了构建一个自动语音构建系统，我们开发了一个自动口音标注技术。实验结果表明，利用该系统，我们成功地标注了口音信息。

The increasing availability of large speech databases makes it possible to construct speech synthesis systems, which are referred to as data-driven or corpus-based approach, by applying statistical learning algorithms. These systems, which can be automatically trained, not only generate natural and high quality synthetic speech but also can reproduce voice characteristics of the original speaker. However, to make the whole voice building process fully-automatic, we need to construct speech databases in an automatic way. In this research work, we investigate automatic voice building techniques for an HMM-based speech synthesis system which can synthesize speech with various voice qualities. First, we implemented an GUI-based labeling tool, called PLEd (Prosody and Linguistic Label Editor). Then, in order to construct an automatic voice building system, we have developed an automatic accent labeling technique. It has been shown that by using the developed system, we have successfully label accent information.