Application of genetic algorithm in unit selection for Malay speech synthesis system

Abstract

Corpus based speech synthesis can produce high quality synthetic speech due to it high sensitivity to unit context. Large speech database is embedded in synthesis system and search algorithm (unit selection) is needed to search for the optimal unit sequence. Speech feature which served as target cost is estimated from the input text. The acoustic parameters which served as join cost are derived from mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and Euclidean distance. In this paper, a new method which is Genetic Algorithm is proposed to search for optimal unit sequence. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a population based search algorithm that is based on the biological principles of selection, reproduction, crossover and mutation. It is a stochastic search algorithm for solving optimization problem. The speech unit sequence that has minimum join cost will be synthesized into complete waveform data.