Gesture-based Articulatory Text to Speech Synthesis

Authors: Benjamin Weitz, Ingmar Steiner, Peter Birkholz

Abstract:

We present work carried out to extend the text to speech (TTS) platform MaryTTS with a back-end that serves as an interface to the articulatory synthesizer VocalTractLab (VTL). New processing modules were developed to (a) convert the linguistic and acoustic parameters predicted from orthographic text into a gestural score, and (b) synthesize it to audio using the VTL software library. We also describe an evaluation of the resulting gesture-based articulatory TTS, using articulatory and acoustic speech data.