Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper:	SLP-L4.3
Session:	Speech Synthesis I
Time:	Wednesday, May 17, 10:40 - 11:00
Presentation:	Lecture
Topic:	Speech and Spoken Language Processing: Voice Morphing
Title:	Text-Independent Voice Conversion Based on Unit Selection
Authors:	David Suendermann, Harald Hoege, Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany; Antonio Bonafonte, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain; Hermann Ney, University of Technology Aachen (RWTH), Germany; Alan W. Black, Carnegie Mellon University, United States; Shrikanth S. Narayanan, University of Southern California, United States
Abstract:	So far, most of the voice conversion training procedures are text-dependent, i.e., they are based on parallel training utterances of source and target speaker. Since several applications (e.g. speech-to-speech translation or dubbing) require text-independent training, over the last two years, training techniques that use non-parallel data were proposed. In this paper, we present a new approach that applies unit selection to find corresponding time frames in source and target speech. By means of a subjective experiment it is shown that this technique achieves the same performance as the conventional text-dependent training.