Recent work on the FESTCAT database for speech synthesis

Abstract

This paper presents our work around the FESTCAT project, whose main goal was the development of voices for the Festival suite in Catalan. In the first year, we produced the corpus and the speech data needed for build 10 voices using the Clunits (unit selection) and the HTS (Markov models) methods. The resulting voices are freely available on the web page of the project and included in Linkat, a Catalan distribution of Linux. More recently, we have updated the voices using new versions of HTS, other technology (Multisyn) and we have produced a child voice. Furthermore, we have performed a prosodic labeling and analysis of the database using the break index labels proposed in the ToBI system aimed to improve the intonation of the synthetic speech.