Information Density Aware Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Project C5 Completed

Project C5 investigates how text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis techniques can be enhanced to take knowledge about information and encoding density into account. The project explores methods to connect and align the processing of high-level information with its encoding into low-level phonetic parameters in TTS synthesis. The approach is to encode information density in two stages: first, directly as high-level parameters during TTS voice building (offline) and, second, during runtime synthesis (online).

Quantification of information density can also be used to develop a model of listeners’ susceptibility to synthesis artifacts, in order to automatically predict and pre-emptively improve the perceived output quality by selecting a sequence of acoustic units that forms the desired variation and density of encoding given a defined degree of information density.

Keywords: text-to-speech synthesis, voicebuilding, acoustic correlates of information density