Abstract
This study implements an online Mandarin speech synthesis system with speaker adaptation and proposes a speech feature substitution approach to improve the quality of the synthesized speech. The system takes texts provided by users as input and performs POS and tone tagging. The synthesis can be done with the acoustic models of users’ choices.This system also provides a speaker adaptation function. First, the user is asked to record a few sentences through a web interface. A speech scoring technique is used to validate the quality of the recorded utterances. The system then uses these utterances to perform speaker adaptation to adjust the acoustic models for speech synthesis.Moreover, this study proposes a speech feature substitution method to improve the quality of speaker adaptation. This method adopts the spectral features extracted from real speech utterances instead of estimating them from acoustic models. The similarity between the synthesized speech and target speech is therefore increased. The experimental result shows that the proposed method is able to improve upon the original method with an 0.4 increase in MOS score.