Automatically-determined Unit Inventories for Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis

语音合成-由计算机生成语音-是移动计算和基于电话的服务的关键技术。最近一项名为单元选择语音合成的发展已经大大提高了语音的质量，以至于它经常与自然语音难以区分。不幸的是，为这种单元选择技术创造新的声音非常昂贵，因为它是劳动密集型的，必须由专家来完成。这阻碍了该技术在许多应用中的使用，例如为欠发达国家的语言生产高质量的语音合成器。我们正在提议开发方法，使为语音合成器创造新声音的速度更快、成本更低，并允许非专家进行这项工作。

Speech synthesis - the generation of speech by computer - is a key technology for mobile computing and telephone-based services. A recent development, called Unit selection speech synthesis has now improved the quality of the speech so much that it is often indistinguishable from natural speech.Unfortunately, the creation of new voices for this unit selection technology is very expensive because it is labour intensive and must be done by experts. This is preventing the use of the technology in many applications, such as the production of high quality speech synthesisers for languages spoken in less developed countries.We are proposing to develop methods that will make it much quicker and cheaper to create new voices for speech synthesisers and also allow non-experts to carry out this work.