Blizzard 2007
in conjunction with the
Sixth ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis
Bonn, Germany / August 25, 2007

Festival Multisyn Voices for the 2007 Blizzard Challenge

Korin Richmond, Volker Strom, Robert Clark, Junichi Yamagishi, Sue Fitt

Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

This paper describes selected aspects of the Festival Multisyn entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2007. We provide an overview of the process of building the three required voices from the speech data provided. This paper focuses on new features of Multisyn which are currently under development and which have been employed in the system used for this Blizzard Challenge. These differences are the application of a more flexible phonetic lattice representation during forced alignment labelling and the use of a pitch accent target cost component. Finally, we also examine aspects of the speech data provided for this year's Blizzard Challenge and raise certain issues for discussion concerning the aim of comparing voices made with differing subsets of the data provided.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Richmond, Korin / Strom, Volker / Clark, Robert / Yamagishi, Junichi / Fitt, Sue (2007): "Festival multisyn voices for the 2007 Blizzard Challenge", In BLZ3-2007, paper 006.