A keyvowel approach to the synthesis of regional accents of English.
Date
1997Author
Williams, Briony
Isard, Stephen
Metadata
Abstract
Most English text-to-speech synthesisers offer one of
only two accents: General American or RP. Developing
a new accent is laborious, since it is not possible to
choose one accent as a base form and systematically
translate to others. We use the approach of Wells ([1]),
categorising vowels in terms of abstract keywords that
encode classes of words. Thus it is unnecessary to use a
phonemic transcription in either the development or the
execution of a synthesiser. The “keyvowel” system can
be used throughout the synthesis system, avoiding the
need to make accent-specific changes manually. The
same linguistic resources can be re-used for each new
accent. More fundamentally, the keyvowel system
functions as a meta-accent that subsumes vowel-related
information in all accents of English.