This is an attempt to continue the efforts put in after the INTERSPEECH 2015 review sessions. The sessions facilitated any research student to learn the topics in an effortless manner. 2015 is the first time IIIT-H has participated in the Blizzard Synthesis Challenge and building the system was one of the most memorable experiences in my Research. In a nutshell, our submission was a Unit Selection and Contenation one with reduced vowel based epenthesis for missing syllables and word to phone mapping for English words.
New to Speech Synthesis? Learn about Speech Synthesis
Blizzard Challenges are conducted every year with an aim to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers using the same data. There were two tasks in Blizzard Challenge 2015.
Hub Task 2015-IH1 – Build one voice in each language from the provided data.
Spoke Task 2015-IH2 – Synthesize multilingual sentences involving one Indian Language
and English.
Each task was on 6 Indian languages: Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.