A Chinese text-to-speech system with text preprocessing and confidence measure for practical usage

Modern Chinese text contains not only Chinese characters but also non-Chinese characters, like figures, abbreviation, marks, etc. Therefore, a proper design of text preprocessing is required for a Chinese text-to-speech (TTS) system in practical usage. In this paper, a Chinese TTS system with a text preprocessor for markup command processing, text normalization, and sentence segmentation is presented. A novel idea, confidence measures for TTS system, was also proposed.