Speech quality and speaker characteristics

One of the applications of speech-coding algotithms is the generation of the output speech of text -to-speech systems. Linear predictive coding (LPC) is still one of the most powerful algorithms used for this purpose. This chapter describes some experiments which evaluate the quality of LPC speech.In particular, intelligibility and naturalness of LPC speech are studied. Ways are indicated to improve existing LPC speech-coding schemes. One altemative, the glottal-excited LPC synthesizer, is described in more detail.