Allophone- and Suballophone-Based Speech Synthesis System for Russian

Abstract

The speech synthesis system developed at the Department of Phonetics of St. Petersburg University combines the advantages of two methods of concatenative speech synthesis — diphone- and allophone- based ones. In a new synthesis, we use physical realizations of allophones for the formation of the consonant inventory. The physical realizations of allophones are chosen with regard to their right phonetic context. In formation of the vowel set, we used the method which combines allophone and diphone based synthesis principles: the database contains halves of vowel allophones (from the physical beginning of the allophone up to its middle and from the middle of the allophone up to its right physical boundary).