Slovak Text-to-Speech Synthesis in ARTIC System

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a brand-new Slovak text-to-speech system. It was developed within the framework of ARTIC system (primarily designed to synthesize Czech speech) with respect to the knowledge of Slovak language. Thus, statistical approach (using hidden Markov models) was employed to build an acoustic unit inventory of Slovak language in a fully automatic way. Both phonetic transcription and prosodic rules were proposed to convert an input text to its phonetic form and to estimate its suprasegmental features. As a result, a fully working text-tospeech system that converts an arbitrary Slovak text to the corresponding output speech was designed. The informal listening tests show the system is capable of producing speech of a high quality (with high level of intelligibility and good naturalness).

Current State of Czech Text-to-Speech System ARTIC

“…After two Czech voices (male and female) were built on the principles described above, two other languages (Slovak [15] and German [16]) have been successfully implemented within the framework of ARTIC TTS system. Our text-to-speech system has been recently applied also in the area of audiovisual speech synthesis -the first computer 3D Czech talking head with realistic face animations was designed [17].…”