This paper discusses techniques for determining the linguistic needs for open-domain synthesis by concatenative methods, and reports on the design and evalaution of a tool for collecting and balancing a speech corpus automatically, in order to ensure optimal coverage of the sounds required for synthesis within a given task-domain. Synthetically-generated utterances are used to prompt speakers, and in-line acoustic analysis determines the prosodic as well as phonemic balance of the resulting speech during recording, re-prompting the speaker with textually modified versions if necessary, to elicit the desired articulation sequences. The closed-loop process, which incorporates human self-collection of a balanced corpus for concatenative speech synthesis.
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