Language Technologies

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SIMPLE4ALL - Speech synthesis that improves through adaptive learning

287678 - STREP

At a glance

FP7-ICT-2011-7 - Language technologies Duration: 36 months Start date: 1 November 2011 End date: 31 October 2014 Project officer: Pierre-Paul Sondag website

Challenge

This project aims to develop an original speech synthesis technology that learns from data with little or no expert supervision and continually improves itself, simply by being used.

The speech synthesis system will be portable to new languages with minimal effort; it will be first developed for the 4 languages of the consortium partners (English, Finish, Spanish, Romanian) and then extended to at least 6 additional ones. The system will also make it easy for non-expert users to create new voices and indeed entire systems in new languages. All developments will be made available to the community under Open Source licenses.

Objective and Innovation

The project aims to enable speech generation in new languages and with new voices with only minimal effort. One innovation is the use of a statistical data-driven approach in the text processing component, making it learnable from data. Another innovation is the use of machine learning techniques to improve the quality of the output speech based on user feedback, and the adaptation of the speaking style to the genre of the text (i.e., the type of content).

Target group of the project

The target group are application developers who need to include speech generation in their system, for instance telecommunication companies or games developers.

The result

The main result of the project is a highly adaptable and portable complete speech synthesis system which can be used for a wide variety of languages and domains. Project partners will use models and algorithms which enable every component of a speech synthesiser to be learned from data, with little or minimal supervision, and which enable learning to continue whilst the system is in use. Those models will be flexible and capable of producing a range of speaking styles, including expressive, conversational, and highly-intelligible speech.

Impact

Improving the usability of speech generation by making the speech sound more natural, extending the use of speech generation to lesser resourced languages and large numbers of niche domains, by reducing the development costs of new speech generation systems.

 

Co-ordinator

Contact Person: Name: Prof Simon King Tel: +44 131 651 4389 E-mail: Simon.King@ed.ac.uk Organisation: THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH More»

 

 

 

 

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