Slovak Text-to-Speech Synthesis in ARTIC System?

Abstract. This paper presents a brand-new Slovak text-to-speech sys-tem. It was developed within the framework of ARTIC system (primarily designed to synthesize Czech speech) with respect to the knowledge of Slovak language. Thus, statistical approach (using hidden Markov mod-els) was employed to build an acoustic unit inventory of Slovak language in a fully automatic way. Both phonetic transcription and prosodic rules were proposed to convert an input text to its phonetic form and to es-timate its suprasegmental features. As a result, a fully working text-to-speech system that converts an arbitrary Slovak text to the correspond-ing output speech was designed. The informal listening tests show the system is capable of producing speech of a high quality (with high level of intelligibility and good naturalness).