Abstract

The main focus of this thesis is on improving the quality of concatenative speech synthesis by taking advantage of the natural (allowable) variability in spoken language, namely, the fact that there are multiple ways of uttering a given sentence and there are several word sequences that can represent a given concept. An architecture for speech generation for constrained domain applications is proposed that tightly integrates language generation and speech synthesis, allowing the choice of words and desired intonation in the system's response to be optimized jointly with the speech output quality. Experiments with a travel planning dialog system have demonstrated that by expanding the space of candidate responses and possible prosodic realizations we achieve higher quality speech output.

Citations