MULTI-LAYERED EXTENSIONS TO THE SPEECH SYNTHESIS MARKUP LANGUAGE FOR DESCRIBING EXPRESSIVENESS

E. Eide, R. Bakis, W. Hamza, and J. Pitrelli

Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech),
Geneva, Switzerland, September 1-4, 2003.

ABSTRACT:

In this paper we discuss possible extensions to the Speech Synthesis Markup Language
(SSML) to facilitate the generation of synthetic expresive speech.  The proposed
extensions are hierarchical in nature, allowing specificatino 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
appeal to different types of users; speech experts may want to use low-level
interfaces while artistic users may prefer to interface with the TTS system at more
abstract levels.