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Limited Domain Synthesis
In some synthesis tasks the range of spoken output required is actually limited (though can still be infinite). The work in limited domain synthesis is to try to make the most common phrases sound the best.

In one extreme, all utterances required can be pre-recorded, but that is too restrictive. Rather than going to the other extreme of just recording diphones (or unit selection) some words and phrases can be record and used appropriately with a diphone (or unit selection) databases to allow good coverage for common phrases but never bad coverage for less common forms.

Here we analyze the language generation system used in the task and build a list of appropriate utterances typical for that domain. We recorded them, autolabel them and build a unit selection synthesizer. There results produce a very high quality synthesizer for utterances within the task domain.

For a more detailed description of these techniques and their advantages see:

  • Black, A. and Lenzo, K. (2000) Limited Domain Synthesis ICSLP2000, Beijing, China. ( postscript, html).
CMU/LTI This page is maintained by Alan W Black (awb@cs.cmu.edu)
Festvox is a project within LTI at Carnegie Mellon University