An introduction to statistical parametric speech synthesis

Statistical parametric speech synthesis, based on hidden Markov model-like models, has become competitive with established concatenative techniques over the last few years. This paper offers a non-mathematical introduction to this method of speech synthesis. It is intended to be complementary to the wide range of excellent technical publications already available. Rather than offer a comprehensive literature review, this paper instead gives a small number of carefully chosen references which are good starting points for further reading.