A keyvowel approach to the synthesis of regional accents of English.

Abstract

Most English text-to-speech synthesisers offer one of only two accents: General American or RP. Developing a new accent is laborious, since it is not possible to choose one accent as a base form and systematically translate to others. We use the approach of Wells ([1]), categorising vowels in terms of abstract keywords that encode classes of words. Thus it is unnecessary to use a phonemic transcription in either the development or the execution of a synthesiser. The “keyvowel” system can be used throughout the synthesis system, avoiding the need to make accent-specific changes manually. The same linguistic resources can be re-used for each new accent. More fundamentally, the keyvowel system functions as a meta-accent that subsumes vowel-related information in all accents of English.