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

语音合成-由计算机生成语音-是移动的计算和基于电话的服务的关键技术。最近的一项发展，称为单元选择语音合成，现在已经大大提高了语音的质量，以至于它通常与自然语音无法区分。不幸的是，为这种单元选择技术创建新的声音非常昂贵，因为它是劳动密集型的，必须由专家完成。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。我们正在建议开发方法，使其更快，更便宜地为语音合成器创建新的声音，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.