The IBM expressive speech synthesis system

Abstract

This paper introduces the IBM Expressive Speech Synthesis system. We describe recent work in improving the quality of our baseline text-to-speech system as well as extending our capabilities to generate expressive synthetic speech. We present results showing improved base quality, especially for sentences drawn from a limited domain. We also demonstrate our ability to convey good news and bad news, produce contrastive emphasis, and ask a question appropriately. In order to facilitate access to the expressive capabilities, we use some of our proposed extensions to the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).