TC-STAR : Evaluation Plan for Voice Conversion Technology

• How is the overall sound quality of the converted speech? The answers can be found applying subjective and objective error criteria. The former is based on listening tests. The latter expresses the distance between the converted speech and corresponding reference speech of the target speaker. However, our experience shows that the objective evaluation of voice conversion technology features severe shortcomings [2, 3]. Consequently, in this paper, we develop a plan limited to subjective measures that is to be applied within the scope of the European speech-to-speech translation project TC-STAR [4].