About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
INTERSPEECH - Eurospeech 2003
Conference paper
Multilayered extensions to the speech synthesis markup language for describing expressiveness
Abstract
In this paper we discuss possible extensions to the Speech SynthesisMarkup Language (SSML) to facilitate the generation of synthetic expressive speech. The proposed extensions are hierarchical in nature, allowing specification in terms of physical parameters such as instantaneous pitch, higher-level parameters such as ToBI labels, or abstract concepts such as emotions. Low-level tags tend to change their values frequently, even within a word, while the more abstract tags generally apply to whole words, sentences or paragraphs. We envision interfaces at different levels to serve different types of users; speech experts may want to use low-level interfaces while artists may prefer to interface with the TTS system at more abstract levels.