A cross-lingual approach to the development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for Malay

摘要

This research reports the development of an HMM-based speech synthesis system for Malay, which is an under-resourced language with few resources including recorded speech and segmental labels. We propose the cross-lingual use of resources for developing a Malay HMM-based speech synthesis system. We used the Festival English speech synthesis system to generate time-aligned phone transcriptions for Malay using specially constructed Malay grapheme-to-phoneme database and English CART. These transcriptions together with Malay recorded speech databases were used for training and synthesis of Malay speech. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed by intelligibility and naturalness tests on the synthetic speech.