ProSynth: an integrated prosodic approach to device-independent, natural-sounding speech synthesis

This paper outlines ProSynth, an approach to speech synthesis which takes a rich linguistic structure as central to the generation of natural-sounding speech. We start from the assumption that the speech signal is informationally rich, and that this acoustic richness reflects linguistic structural richness and underlies the percept of naturalness. Naturalness achieved by structural richness produces a perceptually robust signal intelligible in adverse listening conditions. ProSynth uses syntactic and phonological parses to model the fine acoustic-phonetic detail of real speech, segmentally, temporally and intonationally.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: CSL
• Authors: Richard Ogden, Sarah Hawkins, Jill House, Mark Huckvale, John Local, Paul Carter, Jana Dankovicová, Sebastian Heid
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, CSL 2000, Linguistic Structural Richness, Rich Linguistic Structure, Structural Richness