Microsoft Mulan - a bilingual TTS system

Abstract

This paper describes a bilingual text-to-speech (TTS) system, Microsoft Mulan, which switches between Mandarin and English smoothly and which maintains the sentence level intonation even for mixed-lingual texts. Mulan is constructed on the basis of the Soft Prediction Only prosodic strategy and the Prosodic-Constraint Orient unit-selection strategy. The unit-selection module of Mulan is shared across languages. It is insensitive to language identity, even though the syllable is used as the smallest unit in Mandarin, and the phoneme in English. Mulan has a unique module, the language-dispatching module, which dispatches texts to the language-specific front-ends and merges the outputs of the two front-ends together. The mixed texts are "uttered" out with the same voice. According to our informal listening test, the speech synthesized with Mulan sounds quite natural. Sample waves can be heard at: http://research.microsoft.com/-echang/proiects/tts/mulan.htm.