The NST–GlottHMM entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2015

We describe the synthetic voices forming the joint entry into the 2015 Blizzard Challenge of the Natural Speech Technology consortium, Helsinki University, and Aal to University. The 2015 Blizzard Challenge presents an opportunity to test and benchmark some of the tools we have developed to address the problem of how to produce systems in arbitrary new languages with minimal annotated data and language-specific expertise on the part of the system builders. We here explain how our tools were used to address these problems on the different tasks of the challenge, and provide some discussion of the evaluation results. Some additions to the system used to build voices for the previous Challenge are described: acoustic modelling using deep neural networks with jointly-trained duration model,and an unsupervised approach for handling the phenomenon of inherent vowel deletion which occurs in 3 of the 6 target languages.