Voice Conversion : State-ofthe-Art and Future Work

Introduction Voice conversion is the adaptation of the characteristics of a source speaker’s voice to those of a target speaker. Over the last few years, the interest in voice conversion has risen significantly. This is due to its application to the individualization of text-to-speech systems, whose voices, in general, have to be created in a rather time-consuming way requiring human assistance. In this paper, the most popular applications and solution approaches are itemized. We will see that some applications require text-independent or even cross-language voice conversion. Then, evaluation methods are discussed and, finally, the author’s future work is outlined.