Comparison of Syllable/Phone HMM Based Mandarin TTS

The performance of HMM-based text to speech (TTS) system is affected by the basic modeling units and the size of training data. This paper compares two HMM based Mandarin TTS systems using syllable and phone as basic units respectively with 1000, 3000 and 5000 sentences' training data. Two female speakers' corpora are used as training data for evaluation. For both corpora, the system using syllable as basic unit outperforms the system using phone as basic unit with 3000 and 5000 sentences' training data.