METHOD OF GENERATING A PROSODIC MODEL FOR ADJUSTING SPEECH STYLE AND APPARATUS AND METHOD OF SYNTHESIZING CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH USING THE SAME

An apparatus and method for adjusting the friendliness of a synthesized speech and thus generating synthesized speech of various styles in a speech synthesis system are provided. The method includes the steps of defining at least two friendliness levels; storing recorded speech data of sentences, the sentences being made up according to each of the friendliness levels; extracting at least one of prosodic characteristics for each of the friendliness levels from the recorded speech data, said prosodic characteristics including at least one of a sentence-final intonation type, boundary intonation types of intonation phrases in the sentence, and an average value of F0 of the sentence, with respect to the recorded speech data; and generating a prosodic model for each of the friendliness levels by statistically modeling the at least one of the prosodic characteristics.