Effect of Speaker and Sampling Rate on Mos-X Ratings of Concatenative TTS Voices

Abstract

The MOS-X is a recently-developed questionnaire used to evaluate the quality of artificial speech. In this experiment, participants listened to audio files produced by concatenative text-to-speech voices for the purpose of assessing the effect of Speaker and Sampling Rate on MOS-X ratings. The concatenative voices were developed from recordings of three different human speakers (code named AF, AM, and B) and produced using two different sampling rates (8 kHz and 22 kHz). Six independent groups of raters participated, one group for each combination of speaker and sampling rate. Analyses of variance indicated a significant main effect of Voice, but no significant main effect of Sampling Rate and no significant Voice by Sampling Rate interaction. The results indicate that independent groups of raters are sensitive to speaker differences in concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) voices, but not to differences in these sampling rates.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Cheap Computer Systems Guide. (2003). Cheap computer speakers (http://www.cheap-computers-guide.net/cheap_computer_speakers.htm).

Denes

P. B.

Pinson

E. N.

(1993). The speech chain. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.

Francis

A. L.

Nusbaum

H. C.

(1999). Evaluating the quality of synthetic speech. In Gardner-Bonneau

(ed.), Human Factors and Voice Interactive Systems (pp. 63–97). Boston, MA: Kluwer.

Klatt

D. H.

(1980). Software for a cascade/parallel formant synthesizer. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 67, 971–995.

Lewis

J. R.

(2001). Psychometric properties of the Mean Opinion Scale. In Proceedings of HCI International 2001 (pp. 149–153). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Polkosky

M. D.

Lewis

J. R.

(2003). Expanding the MOS: Development and psychometric evaluation of the MOS-R and MOS-X. International Journal of Speech Technology, 6, 161–182.

Spiegel

M. F.

Streeter

Applying speech synthesis to user interfaces. In Helander

Landauer

T. K.

Prabhu

(eds.), Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 1061–1084). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Wang

Lewis

J. R.

(2001). Intelligibility and acceptability of short phrases generated by embedded text-to-speech engines. In Proceedings of HCI International 2001 (pp. 144–148). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.