Integrating human emotions with spatial speech using optimized selection of acoustic phonetic units

Synthesis of natural sounding speech is state of the art in the field of speech technology. Imitation of the dynamic human voice is required to generate this. The aim of this work is to develop and deploy a natural speech synthesizer for visually impaired persons. The synthesizer has been developed via an integrated approach of adding localization in expressive speech using a personalized speech corpus. A genetic algorithm has been implemented for optimal selection of acoustic phonetic units of speech. This concept has many applications. We tested one of those applications here in different aspects. Its performance is compared on various categories of listeners using a subjective listening test. Encouraging results on various parameters are received from visually impaired listeners.