Thai speech synthesis with emotional tone: Based on Formant synthesis for Home Robot

Abstract

Home robot will have important role in near further. Human will need to communicate with robot, and vice versa. For English language, some robot can communicate with human. On the other hand, there are many limitations for Thai language. However, Thai is a tonal language which one work can be pronounced five tones including emotional tone. Therefore, there is a speech synthesis of Thai language. But, it does not adaptively perform for changing parameters which are used to generate the emotional tone. Therefore, this paper presents Thai speech synthesis with emotional tone based on Formant synthesis to synthesize Thai syllables including accent tone and emotional tone. Formant synthesis is a rule-base approach which can synthesize the speech by parameters. Fundamental frequency (f0) is an important parameter. In proposed method, the core component is the construction of intonation patterns is called rules. These rules are firstly set up in the format of Formants frequencies. The manipulation of this approach begins with substituting each phoneme of input array of phoneme of syllable with corresponded formants frequencies. Then, outcomes of this process are adapted process with parameters. We utilized 5 samples of Thai syllable for 5 people by listening in control room.