Evaluation of Freely Available Speech Synthesis Voices for Halef
Abstract: We recently equipped the open-source spoken dialog system (SDS) Halef with the speech synthesizer Festival which supports both unit selection and HMM-BASED voices. Inspired by the most recent Blizzard Challenge, the largest international speech synthesis competition, we sought to find which of the freely available voices in Festival and those of the strongest competitor Mary are promising candidates for operational use in Halef. After conducting a subjective evaluation involving 36 participants, we found that Festival was clearly outperformed by Mary and that unit selection voices performed en par, if ...
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