Current State of Text-to-Speech System ARTIC: A Decade of Research on the Field of Speech Technologies

This paper provides a survey of the current state of ARTIC – the modern Czech concatenative corpus-based text-to-speech system. Through more than a decade of research & development in the field of speech technologies and applications, the system was enriched with new languages (and, as a consequence, language-dependent NLP methods), and its speech generation capabilities were significantly improved when new progressive speech generation modules (SPS, DNN, HSS) were (and are still being to) designed and incorporated into it. Also, ARTIC has to deal with various requirements on data used to generate speech from, ranging in size, quality and domain of the output speech, while there always was the requirement to achieve the highest quality in terms of both naturalness and intelligibility. Thus, the paper summarizes some of the most significant achievements and demanding tasks which had to be tackled by the system, illustrating the universality and flexibility of this Czech TTS system.