preptalk a preprocessor for talking book production ted van der togt, dedicon, amsterdam
TRANSCRIPT
Situation
• Growing demand for audio products with growing and more diverse user group
• Quality of ‘standard’ TTS ‘not good enough
• Limited budget, more narrators no option
• Need for speed (newspapers, higher education)
Objectives
• Build (components for) TTS production
• Integrate with Daisy Pipeline
• Focus on:
A) Quality improvement
B) Workflow efficiency
C) Resource optimization
Project partners and funding
• Dutchear (speech synthesis)
• Polderland & van den Heuvel HLT (language & speech technology)
Co-financed by:
• VOB (Dutch public library organization)
• several funds
A) TTS Quality improvement
• TTS voices are not perfect
• Documents containing ‘foreign’ text, names
• Ambiguity inherent to language
• TTS software sometimes ‘too smart’
B) Workflow efficiency
• Collaborative web portal based approach, showing status, priority, etc.
• Central lexicon accumulates knowledge about exceptions
• Prioritization of issues within one document when time is limited
C) Resource optimization
• Time needed for quality check
• Time needed to fix incorrect pronunciation
• Licenses on TTS software
• Licenses on lexica
• Licenses on other tools
PrepTalk process
Workflow with 3 steps:
1. Automatic document analysis (Daisy XML)
2. Human (interactive) evaluation and correction
3. Daisy Pipeline Narrator adapted for processing pronunciation information (in SSML)
1. Analysis
• Sentence detection (+named entity recognition)
• Check against lexicon (corpus spoken Dutch)
• Pattern recognition (numbers etc.)
• Suggestions (ambiguity, spelling mistake)
2. Editing environment
• Evaluate issues based on ‘importance’.
• Improve pronunciation with either alternative text or phonemes.
• Listen to corrected text within context.
• Add solutions to central lexicon.
3. Daisy Pipeline Narrator adapted
• SSML to describe pronunciation information.
• X-SAMPA as phonetic alphabet.
• TTS engine independent.
• Connection to TTS server using SOAP
Thank you for your attention.
For questions:[email protected]
Postbus 24 5360 AA Grave The NetherlandsT+ 31 (0) 486 486 486F+ 31 (0) 486 476 535