Speech synthesis for text-to-speech alignment and prosodic feature extraction

The aim of this paper is to present a new and promising approach of the text-to-speech alignment problem. For this purpose, an original idea is developed: a high quality digital speech synthesizer is used to create a reference speech pattern used during the alignment process. The system has been used and tested to extract the prosodic features of read French utterances. The results show a segmentation error rate of about 8%. This system will be a powerful tool for the automatic creation of large prosodically labeled databases and for research on automatic prosody generation.