Automatic Speech Segmentation with the Application of the Czech TTS System

This article presents automatic phonetic segmentation of natural speech based on the use of a speech synthesiser and dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The speech synthesiser is used to create a synthetic reference speech pattern with phonetic segmentation information (phonemes, diphones, syllables, intonation units, etc.). The reference synthetic speech pattern is then used in the alignment process. The main motivation for this work lay in the lack of usable segmentation tools for Czech, especially for the creation of prosodically labelled databases. The segmentation system has been developed for Czech and it uses the Czech TTS system.