Building a Catalan diphone voice

1
Building a Catalan diphone voice

• Ariadna Font Llitjos
• May 10, 2001

2
Defining the phoneset

• Most Catalan phones (34) plus 2 Spanish phones
  (th and jj)
• Reason All Catalan speakers also have Spanish
  phones, and there are many Spanish borrowed words
  that are in most Catalan speakers lexicon
• Left out phones that need a much finer
  classification than the ones made for English
  phones (beta, gamma, etc)

3
Generating Diphone Schema

• Mostly same as Spanish, but with the new set of
  phones.
• Catalan has 8 vowels (w/o considering stress),
  whereas Spanish has only 5 -gt had to add a level
  of vheight (high mid-high mid-low low)
• ( draw graph on the board)
• Mapping Catalan phones to a predefined set of
  phones
• Over generative. Voice better suited to pronounce
  foreign or nonsense words that contain phones in
  the language but no legal combination of those

4
Mapping Catalan phones to a predefined set of
phones

• Options Spanish and English
• My choice English
• Reasons
• English has more phones for vowels, more
  appropriate than Spanish,
• Spanish phones have already been mapped to
  English phones, better to just map the phones
  directly to English, rather than indirectly

5
Generating and recording the prompts

• 1109 prompts (recorded on festvox0)
• Lots of room noise (typing, door, talking, etc.)
• Microphone not always in same position
• Different power and even different intonation and
  duration throughout the whole recording process

6
Labeling nonsense words

• Automatically
• make_labs
• make_diph_index
• Manually
• Find a set of diphones that are wrong and look
  them up in dic/afldiph.est
• Edit and correct the corresponding file with
  emulabel
• Rerun make_diph_index (etc.)

7
Extracting pitchmarks and LPS coefficients

• Automatically
• make_pm_wav (edit to modify pitch range of
  speaker)
• find_powerfactors (tells us what general power
  difference exists between files, calculated a
  table of power modifiers for each file)
• make_lpc

8
Testing phone synthesis

• (SayPhones (pau o l a pau s o k l a r i a d n a
  pau))
• Catalan voice
• Spanish voice
• English voice
• (modifying the phones)

9
Catalan voice is still quite bad

• Bad example
• But it does have a basic Spanish phone
• and without it, it would sound like this
• And here is how kal_diphone sounds

10
Added tokenization

• To be able to tell the numbers in Catalan
  (followed the Spanish tokenizer)
• Show file

11
Added some lexical entries

• Letters of the alphabet, symbols, punctuation,
  some content words

12
Phrasing, duration and intonation

• Not there yet
• Nor can I get it to SayText

13
Summary building a diphone voice

• Define phoneset
• Generate diphone schema
• Generate prompts
• Record prompts
• Label prompts
• Extract pitchmarks and LPC coefficients
• Test phone synthesis
• Hand correct labels
• Add tokenizer
• Add lexicon
• Add prosody, durations and intonation
• Test and evaluate voice
• Package for distribution