The 'Kabushiki Shikyo' program broadcast on NHK Radio 2 reports on the daily closing prices and net changes of about 830 stocks listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Reading out the numerical values without making mistakes within the allotted broadcast time can be extremely difficult for the announcers. We have therefore developed an automatic broadcast system for stock-price bulletins, which uses numerical speech synthesis and automatic speech-rate conversion. Our system has been used in experimental digital terrestrial radio broadcasts since October 2006 and also used in NHK radio 2 since March 2010. This article describes the generation of texts to build the speech waveform database, the mechanism used to synthesize numerical speech via the database, and the evaluation of naturalness for the synthesized speech samples.
To develop emotional speech synthesis technology for sound broadcasting services, listening test judging emotion of speech data was conducted. The results show that about 300 data can be available to formulate the rule of controlling emotional characteristics of speech by extracting the data with more than 70% answered correctly.
放送において音声言語は視聴者に情報を伝達する重要な役割を担っており,音声信号処理を用いて,早口が苦手なお年寄りの聞き取りを支援することや,アナウンサー等の話し手のスキルアップのための訓練装置や語学学習システムなどの技術開発が期待されている.我々は,話速変換や音声変換の研究開発を行い,話速変換技術は,テレビやラジオ受信機の音声聴取補助機能や,インターネットの話速が選べるラジオニュースサービス,スマートフォンの語学学習アプリなどに応用した.また,音声変換の一部として開発したイントネーションやアクセントの分析・変換技術は, PC を用いた語学学習や発声練習を目的に,語学教育番組内や市販の語学学習・発声訓練ソフトウェアとして実用化した.本稿では,それらの技術的特徴と実用化の経緯について述べる.
We have been conducting research on a high-quality speech synthesis system for automatic audio broadcasting. We propose a method for generating manuscripts for speech database to synthesize definite form sentences.
We are developing a tool that can synthesize concatenate word speech and correct its degradation in order to make it broadcasting quality. In this study, several correction functions in were introduced into this tool. It is available to investigate better correction procedure to generate high quality synthesized speech.
We have been conducting research on a high-quality speech synthesis system for automatic audio broadcasting. We propose voice synthesizer to read out a news flash for visually impaired.
This paper describes our study to implement a service that provides visually impaired people with a read-out presentation of a superimposed news flash text. Data broadcasting is used for automatic start-up of speech that is generated by a speech synthesizer. Four possible solutions are considered and each of them is tested using a trial system.
This paper describes a perceptual experiment on naturalness of replacing a phoneme segment to other speaker's one in a speech synthesis and the results of word speech synthesis by the multi speaker database.
A new pause duration setting method for synthesis by compilation of recorded speech is proposed and its effect is confirmed by subjective evaluation test.
We have been conducting research on a high-quality speech synthesis system for automatic audio broadcasting. We propose stock prices voice synthesizer with numerical speech synthesis method and speech rate conversion.
It is useful to combine multi-speaker's speech database for concatenative speech synthesis system. This paper describes a perceptual study on naturalness and personality by exchanging a phoneme segment to other speaker's one in a word speech synthesis. The experimental result shows some phoneme sequences and speakers are available for the exchangement.