Building and training of a new mexican spanish voice for festival

In this paper we describe the work done to build a new voice based on diphone concatenation in the Spanish spoken in Mexico. This voice is compatible with the Text to Speech Synthesis System Festival. In the development of each module of the system the own features of Spanish were taken into account. In this work we hope to enhance the naturalness of the synthesized voice by including a prosodic model. The prosodic factors taken into consideration by the model are: phrasing, accentuation, duration and F0 contour. Duration and F0 prediction models were trained from natural speech corpora. We found the best prediction models by testing several machine learning methods and two different corpora. The paper describes the building, and training process as well as the results and their respective interpretation.