Nextens is an open source text-to-speech system that can be used to convert Dutch text into speech as spoken in The Netherlands. Flemish is the variant of Dutch as spoken in Flanders. These two languages have the same written form, but they sound clearly different. This paper describes how we transformed the Nextens system into a Flemish speaking application. In order to achieve this goal, a high-quality acoustic diphone synthesizer has been developed as the new back-end. This synthesizer is based on a very simple and effective overlap-add technique that can be used to simultaneously solve the problem of waveform concatenation and to perform the necessary prosodic modifications. In addition, some post-lex rules have been adapted to the Flemish speaking style. The resulting Flemish diphone synthesis system has a quality that is comparable to that of a commercial diphone synthesis system.
Mattheyses, W, Latacz, L, Kong, YO & Verhelst, W 2006, A Flemish Voice for the Nextens Text-To-Speech System. in Fifth Slovenian and First International Language Technologies Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Finds and Results from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: A Gender Perspective at the Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm, Sweden, 21/09/09. <http://www.etro.vub.ac.be/Research/DSSP/Publications/int_conf/IS-LTC2006.pdf>
Mattheyses, W., Latacz, L., Kong, Y. O., & Verhelst, W. (2006). A Flemish Voice for the Nextens Text-To-Speech System. In Fifth Slovenian and First International Language Technologies Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia http://www.etro.vub.ac.be/Research/DSSP/Publications/int_conf/IS-LTC2006.pdf
@inproceedings{17f8751a46cb496489ce5a4cb2145ce0,
title = "A Flemish Voice for the Nextens Text-To-Speech System",
abstract = "Nextens is an open source text-to-speech system that can be used to convert Dutch text into speech as spoken in The Netherlands. Flemish is the variant of Dutch as spoken in Flanders. These two languages have the same written form, but they sound clearly different. This paper describes how we transformed the Nextens system into a Flemish speaking application. In order to achieve this goal, a high-quality acoustic diphone synthesizer has been developed as the new back-end. This synthesizer is based on a very simple and effective overlap-add technique that can be used to simultaneously solve the problem of waveform concatenation and to perform the necessary prosodic modifications. In addition, some post-lex rules have been adapted to the Flemish speaking style. The resulting Flemish diphone synthesis system has a quality that is comparable to that of a commercial diphone synthesis system.",
keywords = "Text-to-speech, speech synthesis",
author = "Wesley Mattheyses and Lukas Latacz and Kong, {Yuk On} and Werner Verhelst",
year = "2006",
month = oct,
day = "9",
language = "English",
isbn = "961-6303-83-X",
booktitle = "Fifth Slovenian and First International Language Technologies Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia",
note = "Finds and Results from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: A Gender Perspective at the Medelhavsmuseet ; Conference date: 21-09-2009 Through 25-09-2009",
}