Comunicació presentada a: the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, celebrat del 13 al 16 de juny a Poznań, Polònia.

Speech synthesis has reached a reasonable high quality in recent years. However, there is still room for improvement in terms of naturalness and expressiveness when dealing with large multisentential discourse, since most text-to-speech synthesizers do not fully take into account the prosodic differences that have been observed in discourse units such as paragraphs. This work presents an implementation of paragraph-based prosodic patterns into the open-source MARYTTS platform, enriching its prosody output by means of intra- and inter-paragraph prosodic features. The set of characteristics include pitch decay, pitch range and speech rate variation (as intra-paragraph features), as well as paragraph break pauses and speech rate variation (as inter-paragraph features), previously analyzed in a large set of TED Talks and read-speech sections of the Spoken Wikipedia Corpus. The perception tests, performed both in English and German parametric voices, suggest that paragraph-based features should be further studied and taken into account on future implementations to synthesize large discourse speech.

The authors would like to thank all listeners that took part in the experiments. This work is part of the KRISTINA project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement number H2020-RIA-645012. The second author is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through the Ram´on y Cajal program.