SSML Extensions Aimed To Improve Asian Language TTS Rendering

Both formant synthesis based and concatenative acoustic unit based TTS systems have been developled in Nokia. Many non-English languages have been considered in the development work, and Nokia's Mandarin Chinese TTS system is under continuous development within the TC-STAR framework (www.tc-star.org). To meet the needs of the TTS evaluations in TC-STAR, common interfaces for the input and all the internal modules have been carefully defined. SSML has been taken into use as the input format, and Nokia has proposed extensions related to the Asian language peculiarities.