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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/N66575/01
Title: TOOLS FOR ROBUST,NATURAL-SOUNDING SPEECH SYNTHESIS
Principal Investigator: House, Mrs JE
Other Investigators:
Huckvale, Professor MA Dankovicova, Dr J
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Phonetics and Linguistics
Organisation: UCL
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 June 2000 Ends: 31 May 2001 Value (£): 12,476
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human Communication in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Creative Industries
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
This proposal is intended to bridge a funding gap between the end of an EPSRC-funded grant on natural-sounding, device-independent speech synthesis (ProSynth) and a renewal proposal. (A recent submission was unfunded, for reasons the panel suggests we can put right.) We propose to develop and consolidate Prosynth tools into a publicly-available coherent package. They will allow fast generation of synthetic speech, using ProSynth's statistically-derived, linguistically-informed declarative control structures. They will support concatenative and formant (Hlsyn) synthesizers and be portable to others(with some work by others). Output can be used as it is, or 0, timing and spectral shape manipulated, separately or together, to test hypotheses. The package will include the ProSynth database and hierarchical annotation system, but with a wider range of utterance types and improved methods for avoiding synthesis failure. Users will be able to create their own databases and integrate analysis results into the ProSynth framework. The package will allow others to evaluate and extend our system and it will form a useful basis for future research by ourselves and others. The proposed work will keep two of our three RAs in place and allow PIs to respond to the issues of concern in the last submission.
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