Making English Voices Similar to User’s Voices Using Voice Changer and Interactive Differential Evolution

Abstract

English skills are important for college students when they submit papers to international conferences. We propose a method to practice speaking skills by using a voice changer and Interactive Differential Evolution, which makes English voices similar to users' voices inside of their heads. This method should be useful when users try to imitate any English voices that are different from the users. 11 examinees participated in the experiments through 10 generations with 6 vectors of Differential Evolution in each generation. They kept choosing the better option in terms of the similarity of the voices compared to the examinees' voices. Unfortunately, the transition of the parameters was not significant, and we could not observe any differences between the initial and final generations. However, we also conducted another evaluation experiment, and the results showed that the system could successfully make English voices similar to users' voices inside of their heads. Besides, compared to our previous method, this method is so versatile that we can use any sound resources as a factor of the experiment since this system is voice-changing the PC's output sound. In the future, we would reconsider the number of the parameters and check the effect of them.