Comprehensive evaluation of statistical speech waveform synthesis
This provides an incremental evaluation of a specific TTS technology for speech synthesis applications.
This paper evaluates Amazon's statistical speech waveform synthesis (SSWS) system across multiple domains to assess quality consistency, validates results with separate testers, and analyzes speech errors compared to hybrid unit selection synthesis to identify strengths and weaknesses.
Statistical TTS systems that directly predict the speech waveform have recently reported improvements in synthesis quality. This investigation evaluates Amazon's statistical speech waveform synthesis (SSWS) system. An in-depth evaluation of SSWS is conducted across a number of domains to better understand the consistency in quality. The results of this evaluation are validated by repeating the procedure on a separate group of testers. Finally, an analysis of the nature of speech errors of SSWS compared to hybrid unit selection synthesis is conducted to identify the strengths and weaknesses of SSWS. Having a deeper insight into SSWS allows us to better define the focus of future work to improve this new technology.