CU VOCAL is a Cantonese text-to-speech (TTS) engine. We use a syllable-based concatenative synthesis approach to generate intelligible and natural synthetic speech in Cantonese. The paper reports on our recent enhancements in CU VOCAL to support user adjustments in prosody and style with the use of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) in the input text. CU VOCAL was previously developed as a SAPI-compliant engine to enable easy integration with other applications. The paper also reports on our enhancements in the CU VOCAL SAPI (speech API) engine to support the SAPI 5 XML tags.
['Tien Ying Fung', 'Yuk-Chi Li', 'Helen M. Meng', 'P. C. Ching']
Prosody and style controls in CU VOCAL using SSML and SAPI XML tags