"An HMM-Based Approach to Speech Synthesis"
Prof. Keiichi Tokuda

This talk summarizes our HMM-based approach to speech synthesis.
It will be similar to the talk which I gave at Sphinx Lunch more
than one year ago but I will try to include not only the
technical description but also recent results and demos.  The
basic idea of the approach is very simple: just train HMMs and
generate speech directly from them.  To realize such a speech
synthesis system, however, we need some tricks which will be
presented in the talk.  The attraction of the approach is in
that voice characteristics of synthesized speech can easily be
changed by transforming HMM parameters.  Actually, it is shown
that we can change voice characteristics of synthetic speech by
applying a speaker adaptation technique which has been used in
speech recognition systems.  The relation between the HMM-based
approach and other unit selection approaches will also be
discussed.

Biography:
See http://kt-lab.ics.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/