Comparative evaluation of six German TTS systems

Gerit P. Sonntag, Thomas Portele, Felicitas Haas, Joachim Köhler

Abstract: An application-specific perceptual evaluation was carried out in order to compare six high-quality German text-to-speech systems. Subjects judged the systems’ reading of an email message and a newspaper article according to four application-specific questions and six voice quality attributes. The results indicate significant differences between the systems. Possible applications of the systems were judged rather unfavourably. The main reasons for this proved to be the synthetic prosody and voice quality. Errors concerning text conversion were less important.