A Brazilian Portuguese TTS Based on HMMS

"This paper presents a Brazilian Portuguese TTS based on HMMs, which uses mel-cepstral coefficients as parameters of speech. We implemented an algorithm which performs a phoneme-based transcription to the Portuguese spoken in Rio de Janeiro. For a given text to be synthesized, after the phoneme transcription, static features are extracted from a sentence HMM, generated by concatenating HMMs sub-word units. An algorithm for choosing the best set of those speech units was also developed. Subjective tests show that the proposed TTS gives better results than a PSOLA based on syllabic units, with the advantage of easy speaker adaptation."