Multilingual PSOLA text-to-speech system

Work done at CNET on developing multilingual concatenation-based PSOLA TTS (text-to-speech) systems well adapted to their use in interactive voice services is reviewed. A new system architecture SYC (synthesis control) has been specifically designed for assuring real-time, multichannel, and interactive operation. The data control and transfer methods within the system are now fully independent of the content of the modules, allowing for an easy adaptation of the system to multilingual operation. A complete version has been developed for German, and mixed systems have been elaborated for Italian and English in collaboration with other laboratories, using the same PSOLA synthesizer as for French. The overall quality of the French version has been improved both in naturalness (optimization of the linguistico-prosodic processings) and in articulation accuracy (use of longer units to be concatenated). An automatic segmentation procedure has been developed for the rapid building of new repertories of speech from recordings by new speakers, i.e., for the creation of new synthetic voices. >