New techniques for the compression of synthesizer databases

Most state-of-the-art TTS synthesizers are based on a technique known as synthesis by concatenation, in which speech is produced by concatenating elementary speech units. The design of a high-quality TTS implies the storage of a high number of segments. To facilitate the storage of these segments, this paper proposes a very low complexity coder to compress these databases with a toll quality. A particular interest has been taken in the databases of the MBROLA synthesizer constituted of fixed size frames. The developed coder uses this special characteristic to reach compression rates from 7 to 9 without degradation of the speech quality produced by the synthesizer.