Project management of NTIS P1 Cybernetic Systems and Department of Cybernetics | WiKKY

Project

General

Profile

Team of investigators

The team of investigators consists of two academic workplaces:

UWB team

The UWB team deals mostly with technical solutions of computer speech synthesis. To our best knowledge, it is the only academic workplace in the Czech Republic dealing with the research of speech synthesis. In the context of the project, a corpus-based speech synthesis system ARTIC (built at the UWB) employing both the unit-selection and the HMM-based speech-synthesis methods [HAN10] is used. Following its long-term experience with corpus-based speech synthesis, the workplace from UWB will be responsible for "technical solution" of speech synthesis (i.e. mainly for the objectives from research areas RA3 and RA4), including the enhancement of current algorithms and the implementation of new algorithms and corpus-based approaches to speech synthesis which will incorporate findings from the CU workplace.

Team members

CU team

The CU team is currently the only specialized phonetic laboratory in the Czech Republic. This workplace offers highly specialized knowledge of the theory and practise of Czech speech (in the sense of phonetic, phonological and prosodic processes related to human speech), including the knowledge of the production and perception of speech by humans. Therefore, the members of this team can take a qualified critical stance on the current state-of-the-art of Czech speech synthesis, analyse artifacts present in synthetic speech which render it unnatural, and propose relevant phonetically justified procedures for making it more human-like, i.e. without disruptive effects. The proposed procedures will be subsequently incorporated to the Czech speech synthesis system by the UWB team. The CU workplace will be responsible mainly for the objectives from RA1 and RA2.

Team members