Articulatory Speech Synthesis for Natural User Interfaces

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For years, articulatory synthesis research has been largely overshadowed by formant-based and acoustic-based speech synthesis techniques. While successful in some domains (e.g., voice-based databases), these techniques still cannot produce natural looking and sounding speech from text from an arbitrary speaker. Natural looking and sounding speech technology is one of the next major milestones in voice-based interaction for natural user interfaces. Articulatory speech synthesis has progressed steadily at the fringes of both industrial and academic interest and is now poised to provide the necessary platform to overcome basic problems in speech production and, we believe, represents the next major advance in speech synthesis technology. Because of the structural complexity of the human vocal tract and of speech production behaviour, prior research in 3-dimensional articulatory synthesis has been focused on analyzing and modeling narrowly defined aspects of speech production and vocal tract structure. Rather than modeling a few sub-components of the overall vocal tract for production of a limited set of unnatural utterances, a more complete platform is needed that will allow vocal tract sub-components to be integrated and tested within the context of a working articulatory speech synthesizer that utilizes the best available technologies for the entire vocal tract. For decades, the Haskins 2D Articulatory Speech Synthesizer has been commonly used, even with the well-known limitations of shapes and sounds it can produce, and the lack of accurate representations of either generic or speaker-specific production parameters. Advances, such as VTL by Birkholtz, have made progress in 3D articulatory speech synthesis, but remain visually undeveloped as well as lacking biomechanical foundations. To overcome these limitations and provide a platform for new research in articulatory speech synthesis, we propose to construct and evaluate an aerodynamically driven articulatory speech synthesizer based on a comprehensive, parameterized 3D biomechanical model of the vocal and facial articulators, that is capable of producing both visible and acoustic speech and non-speech.