A model of diphone duration for speech synthesis in Bangla

The aim of this paper is to provide an improved duration model for diphones and a diphone selection technique in Bangla text to speech system Subachan for better speech quality. Segment duration is one of the most important factors for the intonation of the generated speech in concatenative synthesis. For this reason, a good duration model is indispensable. To achieve this, we observed diphone durations in a recorded corpus of words, determined the diphone durations for different positions in the words, observed the signals of consonants in the corpus and categorized them accordingly. The results show that the proper durations produce notably better intonation in the generated speech which improves the naturalness and intelligibility of Subachan.