Resources for speech synthesis of Viennese varieties
Proc. Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC'10
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Date
2010Author
Pucher, Michael
Neubarth, Friedrich
Strom, Volker
Moosmuller, Sylvia
Hofer, Gregor
Kranzler, Christian
Schuchmann, Gudrun
Schabus, Dietmar
Metadata
Abstract
This paper describes our work on developing corpora of three varieties of Viennese for unit selection speech synthesis. The synthetic voices for Viennese varieties, implemented with the open domain unit selection speech synthesis engine Multisyn of Festival will also be released within Festival. The paper especially focuses on two questions: how we selected the appropriate speakers and how we obtained the text sources needed for the recording of these non-standard varieties. Regarding the first one, it turned out that working with a 'prototypical' professional speaker was much more preferable than striving for authenticity. In addition, we give a brief outline about the differences between the Austrian standard and its dialectal varieties and how we solved certain technical problems that are related to these differences. In particular, the specific set of phones applicable to each variety had to be determined by applying various constraints. Since such a set does not serve any descriptive purposes but rather is influencing the quality of speech synthesis, a careful design of such a (in most cases reduced) set was an important task.