In this paper, we describe the set-up process and an initial evaluation of a unit-selection speech synthesizer. The synthesizer is specific in that it is intended to speak with a prominent voice. As a consequence, only very limited resources were available for setting up the unit database. These resources have been extracted from an audio book, segmented with the help of an HMM-based wrapper, and then used with the non-uniform unit-selection approach implemented in the Bonn Open Synthesis System (BOSS). In order to adapt the database to the BOSS implementation, the label files were amended by phrase boundaries, converted to XML, amended by prosodic and spectral information, and then further converted to a MySQL relational database structure. The BOSS system selects units on the basis of this information, adding individual unit costs to the concatenation costs given by MFCC and F0 distances. The paper discusses the problems which occurred during the database set-up, the invested effort, as well as the quality level which can be reached by this approach.

The newly founded European Centre of Excellence for Speech Synthesis (ECESS) is an initiative to promote the development of the European research area (ERA) in the field of Language Technology. ECESS focuses on the great challenge of high-quality speech synthesis which is of crucial importance for future spoken-language technologies. The main goals of ECESS are to achieve the critical mass needed to promote progress in TTS technology substantially, to integrate basic research know-how related to speech synthesis and to attract public and private funding. To this end, a common system architecture based on exchangeable modules supplied by the ECESS members is to be established. The XML-based interface that connects these modules is the topic of this paper.