Limitations to concatenative speech synthesis

This paper discusses techniques for determining the linguistic needs for open-domain synthesis by concatenative methods, and reports on the design and evaluation of a tool for collecting and balancing a speech corpus automatically, in order to ensure optimal coverage of the sounds required for synthesis within a given task-domain. Syntheticallygenerated utterances are used to prompt speakers, and in-line acoustic analysis determines the prosodic as well as phonemic balance of the resulting speech during recording, re-prompting the speaker with textually modi ed versions if necessary, to elicit the desired articulation sequences. The closed-loop process, which incorporates human self-correction and evaluation, allows for more e cient collection of a balanced corpus for concatenative speech synthesis.