An evaluation of automatic phone segmentation for concatenative speech synthesis

This paper studies the performance of automatic phone segmentation from two viewpoints: temporal precision and the effect on the naturalness of synthetic speech. The absolute error of the phone onset time for the best 90% and worst 10% were 4.6 ms and 25.9 ms, respectively. These values are comparable to discrepancies among human labelers. As the result of perception tests in which naturalness was pair-compared between synthetic speeches generated from hand-segmented data and from auto-segmented data, it was found that the latter is statistically inferior.