A Bengali HMM Based Speech Synthesis System
This is an incremental application of an existing method to a new language domain, addressing speech synthesis for Bengali speakers.
The authors tackled the problem of generating Bengali speech using an HMM-based text-to-speech system, resulting in a system that produces adequately natural speech in terms of intelligibility and intonation.
The paper presents the capability of an HMM-based TTS system to produce Bengali speech. In this synthesis method, trajectories of speech parameters are generated from the trained Hidden Markov Models. A final speech waveform is synthesized from those speech parameters. In our experiments, spectral properties were represented by Mel Cepstrum Coefficients. Both the training and synthesis issues are investigated in this paper using annotated Bengali speech database. Experimental evaluation depicts that the developed text-to-speech system is capable of producing adequately natural speech in terms of intelligibility and intonation for Bengali.