Language-independent acoustic cloning of HTS voices: A preliminary study

This paper presents a new method for cross-lingual speaker adaptation in the framework of HMM-based speech synthesis. Taking two HTS voice models as input, one for the desired language and another for the aimed speaker identity, it yields a third model that produces speech in the target language while sounding like the target speaker. The method operates at segmental level (spectral information and average fundamental frequency) and does not require any phonetic or linguistic information. Perceptual evaluation experiments show that, when the input models are good enough, the resulting synthetic voice is perceived as similar to the target speaker with no important quality degradation.