SYLLABLE RECOVERY FROM POLYSYLLABIC WORDS

INTRODUCTION – The need for syllable recovery For general purpose concatenated waveform speech synthesis [1] an exhaustive inventory of stored waveforms for re-arrangement and concatenation is needed. Our SPRUCE system [2] is syllable and word based, and to be truly general purpose its inventory needs examples of all possible syllables. The high level synthesis engine (responsible for the segmental phonology and prosody of utterances) is already general purpose – but its use is limited by small lower level inventories of re-combinable waveforms. The purpose of the feasibility study reported here was to determine to what extent we could take one of the word based limited domain versions of the system, MeteoSPRUCE, designed for weather forecasting applications, and extend its usability by excising syllables from polysyllabic words in its inventory and recombining them to form new words – thus widening usability without the need for re-recording [3] [4] [5] [6] [7].