Sentence-generating system for speech synthesis using templates and application for the 'Weather Report" radio program

The design method of a sentence set for a speech-synthesis database strongly influences the quality of the synthesized speech. To minimize the costs associated with making the speech recordings and constructing the speech database, the number of the sentence set should be limited. However, if a sentence set does not include sufficient data, the quality of the synthesized speech can be inadequate. In this paper, we propose a method for generating a sentence set from templates. When applied to the templates in the "Weather Report" radio program, the proposed method reduced the number of the sentence set to less than several percent of that required by a comparison method. In addition, the mean opinion score of speech samples synthesized using the proposed method was 4.32 on a five-point scale.