[hts-users:04388] Re: Building Chinese voices using HTS

[Nickolay V.Shmyrev <nshmyrev@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Dongpeng

16.03.2016, 11:28, "DONGPENG CHEN" <dpchen@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi,
>
> I worked on ASR for many years, but recently we need to build Chinese voices.
>
> I have successfully run the HTS demo for English. I found that HTS actually calls the festvox to convert *.txt files to *.utt files. If I am right, festvox makes use of cmu English dictionary to do this.
>
> My question is, if I have Chinese waves, labels, and dictionary, how can I make festvox convert my *.txt to *.utt ? Or is there tutorial on how to set up new languages using HTS?

You need to create a simple Chinese unitselection voice for Festival first, it is not very complex, you need to implement letter to sound rules and describe the phoneset, you can skip intonation and duration modules. The tutorial for Festvox is here:

http://festvox.org/bsv

I suggest you to read it from start to end, it contains quite some useful information.

> Another concern is, do I need to add questions on tones for the Chinese decision tree since it is a toning language?

Yes, sure, you need to add parameters which define actual acoustics to the model.