1. Professor Alan W. Black Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science The University of Texas at Dallas 2601 N. Floyd Road Richardson, TX 75083 For more information: Phone: 972-883-2974 www.utdallas.edu Distinguished Lecturer Series 2006 Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and the Dallas Chapter of IEEE Signal Processing Society Making Synthetic Speech Output as Natural, Flexible and Efficient as Human Speech As speech technology matures to a level where it becomes practical for human-machine communication, much greater demands are now placed on the quality of the voice output. It is no longer sufficient to simply provide an understandable voice, communication demands an appropriate voice, of course, in the appropriate language, but also in the right style, and even particular identity. This talk will present a series of work, that describes the basic processes involved in building synthetic voices. Over the past 10 years we have developed core synthesis techniques, engines and tools to make the building process better defined and more successful. Using data-driven techniques we have refined and optimized the processes of corpus-based synthesis itself, prompt selection, automatic labeling, lexicon construction, articulatory voice conversion and evaluation techniques. Our synthesizers, Festival and Flite, and the voices constructed with the FestVox tools have been used in a large number of speech applications, including: spoken dialog systems, speech-to-speech translation, and talking heads. Date: Friday, Dec. 15, 2006 Time: 11:00 a.m. Place: Engineering and Computer Science Complex UTD Campus TI Auditorium 2.102 P r e s e n t Biographical Statement: Alan W Black is an Associate Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously worked in the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh, and before that at ATR in Japan. He is one of the principal authors of the Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice building tools and CMU Flite, a small footprint speech synthesis engine. He is also Chief Scientist and co-founder of the for-profit company Cepstral, LLC. He received his PhD in Computational Linguistics from Edinburgh University in 1993, his MSc in Knowledge Based Systems also from Edinburgh in 1986, and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Coventry University in 1984. Although his recent work primarily focuses on speech synthesis, he also works on small footprint speech-to-speech translation systems (Croatian, Arabic and Thai), telephone-based spoken dialog systems, and speech for robots. Alan W Black is an elected member of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee, and on the editorial board of Speech Communications. He was program chair of the ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop 2004, and was general co-chair of Interspeech 2006 -- ICSLP. In 2004, with Prof Keiichi Tokuda, he initiated the now annual Blizzard Challenge, the largest multi-site evaluation of corpus-based speech synthesis techniques.