Evaluation of speaker mimic technology for personalizing SGD voices

In this paper, we demonstrate the use of state-of-the-art speech technology to transform speech from a source speaker to mimic a particular target speaker with the intention of providng personalized voices to users of Speech Generating Devices (SGDs). This speaker mimicry (SM) capability allows us to use highquality acoustic inventories from professional speakers and transform them to a different target speaker using a very limited set of sentences from that speaker. This technology targets future SGD users who still have a limited vocabulary or available previous recordings. The results of a perceptual study show that listeners can identify which SM voices most resemble their respective target voices.1

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INTERSPEECH
• Authors: Esther Klabbers, Alexander Kain, Jan P. H. van Santen
• Keywords: INTERSPEECH 2010, Particular Target Speaker, Signal Processing, Speech Generating Devices, Target Speaker