A general question about speech synthesis

[Yalu K]

What are the major factors causing the “unnaturalness” of synthesized speech in the current speech synthesis technology?

[Simon]

We’ll come on to this a little later, and then a lot more in the second semester course. The answer depends on the type of synthesis, and here are a few factors:

For all synthesis methods:

• Prosody – both intonation (F0) and duration

For concatenative synthesis:

• Discontinuities at the joins
• Units taken from inappropriate contexts (e.g., mismatched co-articulation)

For parametric synthesis:

• Artefacts of vocoding (e.g., ‘buzzy’ speech)
• Effects of averaging several speech samples together (e.g., ‘muffled’ speech)

[Author]

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