Abstract
This paper gives a survey of the current state of ARTIC – the modern Czech concatenative corpus-based text-to-speech system. All stages of the system design are described in the paper, including the acoustic unit inventory building process, text processing and speech production issues. Two versions of the system are presented: the single unit instance system with the moderate output speech quality, suitable for low-resource devices, and the multiple unit instance system with a dynamic unit instance selection scheme, yielding the output speech of a high quality. Both versions make use of the automatically designed acoustic unit inventories. In order to assure the desired prosodic characteristics of the output speech, system-version-specific prosody generation issues are discussed here too. Although the system was primarily designed for synthesis of Czech speech, ARTIC can now speak three languages: Czech (both female and male voices are available), Slovak and German.
Support for this work was provided by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, project No. 1ET101470416, and the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. 102/05/0278.
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Matoušek, J., Tihelka, D., Romportl, J. (2006). Current State of Czech Text-to-Speech System ARTIC. In: Sojka, P., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4188. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11846406_55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11846406_55
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