Reading Desk for Preschool Children and Older People with Emotional Speech Synthesis

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a reading desk designed to read books to the older people and children. For this purpose, we propose a reading desk together with an emotional speech synthesis system for Korean. The reading desk system provides a wireless audio output unit, and the reading desk is directly connected to a laptop computer in order to identify the current user and target reading material. The emotional speech synthesis system for Korean is a prosody re-synthesis system that has the option of providing four different emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. Therefore, this system is also able to modify the speech rate and intensity information of speech as much as users want. We analyzed 240 pieces of emotional speech in order to extract distinct prosody structures for each emotion in Korean. The evaluation results show that we have achieved 48.5% of the recognition rate for happiness among four emotions, and with enough training experience, the average recognition rate has improved up to 95.5% for all emotions.