A new spectral smoothing algorithm for unit concatenating speech synthesis

Speech unit concatenation with a large database is presently the most popular method for speech synthesis. In this approach, the mismatches at the unit boundaries are unavoidable and become one of the reasons for quality degradation. This paper proposes an algorithm to reduce undesired discontinuities between the subsequent units. Optimal matching points are calculated in two steps. Firstly, the Kullback-Leibler distance measurement is utilized for the spectral matching, then the unit sliding and the overlap windowing are used for the waveform matching. The proposed algorithm is implemented for the corpus-based unit concatenating Korean text-to-speech system that has an automatically labeled database. Experimental results show that our algorithm is fairly better than the raw concatenation or the overlap smoothing method.