Automatic personal synthetic voice construction

We describe techniques used for automatic personal synthetic voice creation in our laboratory. These techniques are implemented in two pieces of software. One, called InvTool, guides novice users in the process of recording a corpus of speech that is appropriate for creation of a concatenative synthetic voice. The other program, called BCC, compiles a speech corpus recorded with InvTool into a database appropriate for use with the ModelTalker TTS system. Our primary goal in this project is to develop software to support "voice banking" wherein individuals at risk to lose the ability to speak will be able to record their own personal synthetic voice for later use in voice output communication devices.