Presence of appropriate acoustic cues of affective features in the synthesized speech can be a prerequisite for the proper evaluation of the semantic content by the message recipient. In the recent work the authors have focused on the research of expressive speech synthesis capable of generating naturally sounding synthetic speech at various levels of arousal. Automatic information and warning systems can be used to inform, warn, instruct and navigate people in dangerous, critical situations, and increase the effectiveness of crisis management and rescue operations. One of the activities in the frame of the EU SF project CRISIS was called "Extremely expressive (hyper-expressive) speech synthesis for urgent warning messages generation''. It was aimed at research and development of speech synthesizers with high naturalness and intelligibility capable of generating messages with various expressive loads. The synthesizers will be applicable to generate public alert and warning messages in case of fires, floods, state security threats, etc. Early warning in relation to the situations mentioned above can be made thanks to fire and flood spread forecasting; modeling thereof is covered by other activities of the CRISIS project. The most important part needed for the synthesizer building is the expressive speech database. An original method is proposed to create such a database. The current version of the expressive speech database is introduced and first experiments with expressive synthesizers developed with this database are presented and discussed.
Publié le : 2015-02-11
Classification:  Crisis management, warning speech synthesis, soothing speech synthesis, acoustic cues of arousal, expressive speech database,  68T10, 62-07
@article{cai2816,
     author = {Milan Rusko; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, D\'ubravsk\'a cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava and Sakhia Darjaa; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, D\'ubravsk\'a cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava and Mari\'an Trnka; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, D\'ubravsk\'a cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava and R\'obert Sabo; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, D\'ubravsk\'a cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava and Marian Ritomsk\'y; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, D\'ubravsk\'a cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava},
     title = {Expressive Speech Synthesis for Critical Situations},
     journal = {Computing and Informatics},
     volume = {33},
     number = {3},
     year = {2015},
     language = {en},
     url = {http://dml.mathdoc.fr/item/cai2816}
}
Milan Rusko; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava; Sakhia Darjaa; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava; Marián Trnka; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava; Róbert Sabo; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava; Marian Ritomský; Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava. Expressive Speech Synthesis for Critical Situations. Computing and Informatics, Tome 33 (2015) no. 3, . http://gdmltest.u-ga.fr/item/cai2816/