Diagnostic evaluation of a synthesizer's acoustic inventory.

In speech synthesis, utterances are created by concatenating elements from an acoustic inventory made up of phonemes, dyads, syllables, or other convenient units. For further development of the AT&T text-to-speech system [J. P. Olive and M. Y. Liberman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 78, S6 (1985)] we need a fast, simple method to identify problems with elements in the acoustic inventory. Phonetic transcription is one method that has been used in the past for this type of synthetic-speech evaluation. However, transcription experiments are difficult to run and require specially trained listeners. Other methods that have been used, e.g., the diagnostic rhyme test, are better suited to provide comparative information about several synthesizers than the diagnostic information needed for this evaluation. To fill this gap, we have developed a procedure that we call verification. It is an interactive, computer-based procedure that can be used with listeners who have little training. In this talk we describe the procedure and its early application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]