Building synthetic voices in the METANET framework

Abstract

METANET4U is a European project aiming at supporting language technology for European languages and multilingualism. It is a project in the META-NET Network of Excellence, a cluster of projects aiming at fostering the mission of META, which is the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance, dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. This paper describe the resources produced at our lab to provide Synthethic voices. Using existing 10h corpus for a male and a female Spanish speakers, voices have been developed to be used in Festival, both with unit-selection and with statistical-based technologies. Furthermore, using data produced for supporting research on intra and inter-lingual voice conversion, four bilingual voices (English/Spanish) have been developed. The paper describes these resources which are available through META. Furthermore, an evaluation is presented to compare different synthesis techniques, influence of amount of data in statistical speech synthesis and the effect of sharing data in bilingual voices.