A Method of Creating a New Speaker's VoiceFont in a Text-to-Speech System

This paper presents a method of creating a new speaker’s voice database (VoiceFont) by which the voice of the donor speaker can be synthesized for mimicking in a text-to-speech system. A VoiceFont creation system, “VoiceFont Builder”, is developed to make the creation process easier and more effective than current systems. The voice feature extraction applied in the system is a simple but powerful method that makes the most of the target speech synthesizer. Using a VoiceFont obtained, we conducted experiments on F0 contour generation in view of reproducing that of the donor speaker’s voice.