Text-to-speech system for Brazilian Portuguese using a reduced set of synthesis units

An unrestricted text-to-speech synthesis system for Brazilian Portuguese is presented. The system is based on concatenation by rules of basic speech units. A reduced set of speech units (149) is proposed. This set comprises mostly consonant-oral vowel (CV) transitions, which represent crucial acoustic segments in the speech production process. The authors show that using this inventory of units it is possible to synthesize highly intelligible speech for Brazilian Portuguese. A CELP model is used as compression and synthesis structure.<
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