The USTC System for Blizzard Challenge 2009

This paper introduces the USTC’s speech synthesis system for Blizzard Challenge 2009. USTC attended all English tasks including the hub tasks and the spoke tasks. According to the various conditions for different tasks, different versions of HMM based unit-selection systems are constructed based on the USTC Blizzard Challenge 2008 system. Many new techniques are employed in our speech synthesis system construction. Results of internal experiments comparing these techniques are shown, and analyzed. The evaluation results of Blizzard Challenge 2009 prove that our system has good quality in all the naturalness, similarity and intelligibility of the synthetic speech.