Highly Natural Chinese Speech Synthesis with a Talking Avatar

H. Meng

We are developing text-to-audiovisual-speech synthesizer that can automatically generate a synthetic speech, together with a talking avatar based on textual input. This avatar can speak in Cantonese or Putonghua. We are working on improving the naturalness of the avatar, both in terms of its spoken expressions, as well as facial expressions and articulatory gestures. This exciting project has many applications, e.g. electronic books, reading aids for the visually impaired, language learning, singing synthesis, etc. Please see www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/crystal