Abstract

Until recently, text-to-speech was often just an ‘optional extra’ which allowed text to be read out loud. But now, thanks to HMM and speaker adaptation technologies, which were originally developed for ASR , speech synthesis can mean more than just the reading out of text in a predefined voice. New research areas and more interesting applications are emerging. In this talk, after a quick overview of the basic approaches to statistical speech synthesis including speaker adaptation, we consider some of these new applications of speech synthesis. We look behind each application at the underlying theoretical techniques used and describe the scientific advances that have made them possible. The applications we will examine include personalised speech-to-speech translation, clinical applications such as voice reconstruction for patients who have disordered speech, and noise-adaptive speech synthesis. The techniques we will examine include structural adaptation approaches, unsupervised adaptation, multi-pass architecture, and cross-lingual adaptation for speech synthesis.