Building an English speech synthesis system from a Japanese ALS patient's voice

This paper reports on the development of an English speech synthesis system for a Japanese amyotropic lateral sclerosis patient as part of the project of developing a bilingual communication aid for this patient. The patient had a tracheotomy three years ago and anticipates the possibility of losing his phonatory function. His English speech database for Festival, a free speech synthesis system, was generated from his reading of a US diphone list. There were two problems with the recording. The first was the noise that the artificial ventilator made and the second was his difficulty in pronouncing English. Although the speaker's English database was successfully built by Festvox and the voice was recognized as his voice, the utterance was unintelligible. We therefore proposed reconstructing the patient's database by partially combining it with an English native speaker's database. Results showed that the proposed approach can be promising for those facing this problem.