Speech synthesis for Chinese dialects based on the phonological system of ancient Chinese

The HTS speech training synthesis tools and STRAIGHT speech synthesizer are used for speech training synthesis of an unknown dialect phonetic system.This study applies these methods to various Chinese dialects by designing a set of universal pronunciation texts for Chinese dialect speech synthesis with recording of a synthesized speech corpus for some Chinese dialects.A Chinese dialect speech synthesis platform is then built based on the phonological system of ancient Chinese.Results for Mandarin speech synthesis show that the synthesized sound based on the phonological system of ancient Chinese is quite close in terms of intelligibility and quality to the synthesized sound based on the pinyin system.Thus,the speech synthesis based on the phonological system of ancient Chinese for Chinese dialects is effective and feasible.