Síntese de fala a partir de texto com reduzidos requisitos computacionais - 392

Acknowledgments First, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Luís Caldas de Oliveira, my adviser, for is support, encouragement and guidance. I would like to thank Sérgio Paulo and Luís Figueira, for their substantial help and work in the Tecnovoz,corpus,without which it would,be impossible to do this thesis; Renato Cassaca and David Matos, for their c/c++ programming suggestions that helped me solve many problems. Helena Moniz, for helping me with the linguistic issues; Professor João Paulo Neto and all my colleagues,from the Tecnovoz,project for their contagious enthusiasm while achieving the impossible, and everyone else at L2F, for the great work environ- ment,that they builded. Finally, I would like to give my special thanks to my friends and family for all their support over the last two years. Lisbon, September 29, 2008 Carlos Miguel Duarte Mendes Abstract In recent years, TTS systems have become an important output device in human-machine interfaces, and they are used in many applications such as car navigation systems, information retrieval over telephone, voice mail and so on. Although most concatenation based TTS systems are able to synthesize speech with high quality, their performance decreases when the computa- tional requirements,are very low. Usually due to the large amount,of pre-recorded speech,stored in the database. This thesis main objective was,the development,of a small footprint text to speech,synthesis system, by using HMM models to generate artificial speech. The developed system was applied for European Portuguese, but is general enough to be extended to other languages. Keywords