Recent development of the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)

Abstract

A statistical parametric approach to speech synthesis based HMMs has grown in popularity over the last few years. In this approach, spectrum, excitation, and duration of speech are simultaneously modeled by context-dependent HMMs, and speech waveforms are generated from the HMMs themselves. Since December 2002, we have publicly released an opensource software toolkit named "HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)" to provide a research and development toolkit for statistical parametric speech synthesis. This paper describes recent developments of HTS in detail, as well as future release plans.