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SUMMARYDeep neural network (DNN)-based speech synthesis can produce more natural synthesized speech than the conventional HMMbased speech synthesis. However, it is not revealed whether the synthesized speech quality can be improved by utilizing a multi-speaker speech corpus. To address this problem, this paper proposes DNN-based speech synthesis using speaker codes as a method to improve the performance of the conventional speaker dependent DNN-based method. In order to model speaker variation in the DNN, the augmented feature (speaker codes) is fed to the hidden layer(s) of the conventional DNN. This paper investigates the effectiveness of introducing speaker codes to DNN acoustic models for speech synthesis for two tasks: multi-speaker modeling and speaker adaptation. For the multi-speaker modeling task, the method we propose trains connection weights of the whole DNN using a multi-speaker speech corpus. When performing multi-speaker synthesis, the speaker code corresponding to the selected target speaker is fed to the DNN to generate the speaker's voice. When performing speaker adaptation, a set of connection weights of the multi-speaker model is re-estimated to generate a new target speaker's voice. We investigated the relationship between the prediction performance and architecture of the DNNs through objective measurements. Objective evaluation experiments revealed that the proposed model outperformed conventional methods (HMMs, speaker dependent DNNs and multi-speaker DNNs based on a shared hidden layer structure). Subjective evaluation experimental results showed that the proposed model again outperformed the conventional methods (HMMs, speaker dependent DNNs), especially when using a small number of target speaker utterances. key words: speech synthesis, acoustic model, deep neural network, speaker codes

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