Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

● The system is far too slow. Although machines are getting faster, it still takes too long to start the system and
get it to speak some given text. Even so, on reasonable machines, Festival can generate the speech several
times faster than it takes to say it. But even if it is five time faster, it will take 2 seconds to generate a 10
second utterance. A 2 second wait is too long. Faster machines would improve this but a change in design is a
better solution.
● The system is too big. It takes a long time to compile even on quite large machines, and its foot print is still in
the 10s of megabytes as is the run-time requirement. Although we have spent some time trying to fix this
(optional modules have made the possibility of building a much smaller binary) we haven't done enough yet.
● The signal quality of the voices isn't very good by today's standard of synthesizers, even given the
improvement quality since the last release. This is partly our fault in not spending the time (or perhaps also
not having enough expertise) on the low-level waveform synthesis parts of the system. This will improve in
the future with better signal processing (under development) and better synthesis techniques (also under
development).
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31. References
allen87
Allen J., Hunnicut S. and Klatt, D. Text-to-speech: the MITalk system, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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Abelson H. and Sussman G. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press, 1985.
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Black A. and Taylor, P. "CHATR: a generic speech synthesis system.", Proceedings of COLING-94, Kyoto,
Japan 1994.
black96
Black, A. and Hunt, A. "Generating F0 contours from ToBI labels using linear regression", ICSLP96, vol. 3,
pp 1385-1388, Philadelphia, PA. 1996.
black97b
Black, A, and Taylor, P. "Assigning Phrase Breaks from Part-of-Speech Sequences", Eurospeech97, Rhodes,
Greece, 1997.
black97c
Black, A, and Taylor, P. "Automatically clustering similar units for unit selection in speech synthesis",
Eurospeech97, Rhodes, Greece, 1997.
black98
Black, A., Lenzo, K. and Pagel, V., "Issues in building general letter to sound rules.", 3rd ESCA Workshop on
Speech Synthesis, Jenolan Caves, Australia, 1998.
black99
Black, A., and Lenzo, K., "Building Voices in the Festival Speech Synthesis System," unpublished document,
Carnegie Mellon University, available at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/docs/festvox/
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Breiman, L., Friedman, J. Olshen, R. and Stone, C. Classification and regression trees, Wadsworth and
Brooks, Pacific Grove, CA. 1984.
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Campbell, N. and Isard, S. "Segment durations in a syllable frame", Journal of Phonetics, 19:1 37-47, 1991.
DeRose88
DeRose, S. "Grammatical category disambiguation by statistical optimization". Computational Linguistics,
14:31-39, 1988.
dusterhoff97
Dusterhoff, K. and Black, A. "Generating F0 contours for speech synthesis using the Tilt intonation theory"
Proceedings of ESCA Workshop of Intonation, September, Athens, Greece. 1997
dutoit97
Dutoit, T. An introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis Kluwer Acedemic Publishers, 1997.
hunt89
Hunt, M., Zwierynski, D. and Carr, R. "Issues in high quality LPC analysis and synthesis", Eurospeech89,
vol. 2, pp 348-351, Paris, France. 1989.
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Jilka M. Regelbasierte Generierung natuerlich klingender Intonation des Amerikanischen Englisch,