Abstract-This paper presents a study on coarticulatory labialization and the significance of its respecting/violation during selection and concatenation of speech units in the unit selection speech synthesis. The aim of this study is to improve the overall speech quality, especially to increase the perceptual inconspicuousness between concatenated units. The labialization importance was verified by two listening tests-for phonetic laymen and specialists. To suppress the influence of other factors, both tests contained utterances with specially selected phones in specific contexts with respected and violated labialization. The preference for items with correct labialization was evident, which confirms the benefit of considering coarticulatory labialization in a unit selection speech synthesis.
This paper presents initial experiments with the identification and automatic detection of parasitic sounds in speech signals.The main goal of this study is to identify such sounds in the source recordings for unit-selection-based speech synthesis systems and thus to avoid their unintended usage in synthesised speech. The first part of the paper describes the phonetic analysis and identification of parasitic phenomena in recordings of two Czech speakers. In the second part, experiments with the automatic detection of parasitic sounds using HMM-based and BVM classifiers are presented. The results are encouraging, especially those for glottalization phenomena.
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