Towards a Chinese text-to-speech system with higher naturalness

Abstract

This paper presents our research efforts on Chinese text-to-speech towards higher naturalness, the main results can be summarized as follows: 1. In the proposed TTS system the syllable-sized units were cut out from the real recorded speech, the synthetic speech was generated by concatenating these units back together. 2. The integration of units synthesized by rules with natural units was tested. A LMA filter based synthesizer was developed successfully to test and generate those units, which were difficult to be collected from the speech corpus. 3. A new efficient Chinese character coding scheme - "Yin Xu Code"(YX Code) has been developed to assist the GB Code. Based on above results, a Chinese text-to-speech system named as "KD-863" has been developed. In the national assessment of Chinese TTS systems held at the end of March 1998 in Beijing, the system achieved a first of the naturalness MOS (Mean Opinion Score).