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A Flemish Voice for the Nextens Text-To-Speech System Host Publication: Finds and Results from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: A Gender Perspective at the Medelhavsmuseet Authors: W. Mattheyses, L. Latacz, Y. On Kong and W. Verhelst Publication Date: Oct. 2006
Abstract: Nextens is an open source text-to-speech system that can be used to convert Dutch text into speech as spoken in The Netherlands. Flemish is the variant of Dutch as spoken in Flanders. These two languages have the same written form, but they sound clearly different. This paper describes how we transformed the Nextens system into a Flemish speaking application. In order to achieve this goal, a high-quality acoustic diphone synthesizer has been developed as the new back-end. This synthesizer is based on a very simple and effective overlap-add technique that can be used to simultaneously solve the problem of waveform concatenation and to perform the necessary prosodic modifications. In addition, some post-lex rules have been adapted to the Flemish speaking style. The resulting Flemish diphone synthesis system has a quality that is comparable to that of a commercial diphone synthesis system. External Link.
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