On building a concatenative speech synthesis system from the Blizzard Challenge speech databases

In this paper, we compare two methods of building a concatenative speech synthesis system from the relatively small, "Blizzard Challenge" speech databases. In the first method we build a system directly from the Blizzard databases using the IBM Concatenetative Speech Synthesis System originally designed for very large speech databases. In the second method, a larger database is used to build the synthesis system and the output is "morphed" to match the speakers in the Blizzard databases. The second method outperformed the first while maintaining the identity of the Blizzard target speakers.