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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/D058139/1
Title: Automatically-determined Unit Inventories for Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Principal Investigator: King, Professor S
Other Investigators:
Aylett, Dr MP
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Centre for Speech Tech Research-PPLS
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 July 2006 Ends: 30 June 2009 Value (£): 238,471
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human Communication in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Creative Industries
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Speech synthesis - the generation of speech by computer - is a key technology for mobile computing and telephone-based services. A recent development, called Unit selection speech synthesis has now improved the quality of the speech so much that it is often indistinguishable from natural speech.Unfortunately, the creation of new voices for this unit selection technology is very expensive because it is labour intensive and must be done by experts. This is preventing the use of the technology in many applications, such as the production of high quality speech synthesisers for languages spoken in less developed countries.We are proposing to develop methods that will make it much quicker and cheaper to create new voices for speech synthesisers and also allow non-experts to carry out this work.
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Organisation Website: http://www.ed.ac.uk