SPEECH SYNTHESIS USING LARGE SPEECH DATA-BASE

In this paper, we introduce a new speech synthesis method for Japanese and Korean arbitrary sentences using the natural speech data-base. Also, application of this method to a CAI system is discussed. In our synthesis method, a basic sentence and basic accent-phrases are selected from the data-base against a target sentence. Factors for those selections are phrase dependency structure (separation degree), number of morae, type of accent and phonemic labels. The target pitch pattern and phonemic parameter series are generated using those selected basic units. As the pitch pattern is generated using patterns which are directly extracted form real speech, it is expected to be more natural than any other pattern which is estimated by any model. Until now, we have examined this method on Japanese sentence speech and affirmed that the synthetic sound preserves human-like features fairly well. Now we extend this method to Korean sentence speech synthesis. Further more, we are trying to apply this synthesis unit to a CAI system.