A talking face for Portuguese

Raquel de Castro Lisboa; António J. S. Teixeira; Artur Pimenta Alves

Raquel de Castro Lisboa FEUP
António J. S. Teixeira
Artur Pimenta Alves FEUP; INESC Porto

Keywords: Talking face, Visual speech, Computer animation, Face animation, Audiovisual speech synthesis, Text-to-Speech synthesis

Abstract

Combination of speech output with animated agents, complete or represented by face alone, has many applications, including in telecommunications. Aiming at contributing to the availability of such technologies for our language, this paper presents the development of the necessary building blocks to have a talking face for Portuguese. Work focused on the adaptation of an available system, named RUTH, the development of a basic Portuguese voice for the Festival speech synthesis system, and development of an easier way of controlling the talking face behaviour by using XML annotations. As a demonstration of the developed talking face, an application capable of controlling in real time severa1 faces, each speaking with a different voice, based on XML annotated text input was implemented.