ECESS Platform for Web Based TTS Modules and Systems Evaluation

The paper presents platform for web based TTS modules and systems evaluation named RES (Remote Evaluation System). It is being developed within the European Centre of Excellence for Speech Synthesis (ECESS, www.ecess.eu). The presented platform will be used for web based online evaluation of various text-to-speech (TTS) modules, and even complete TTS systems, presently running at different Institutes and Universities worldwide. Each ECESS partner has to install the RES module server locally and connect it with its TTS modules. Using the RES client, partners will be able to perform different evaluation tasks for their modules using any necessary additional modules and/or language resources of their other partners, installed locally at the other partners’ sites. Additionally, they will be able to integrate their own modules into the complete web-based TTS system in conjunction with the necessary modules of other partners. By using the RES client they could also build-up a complete TTS system via web, without using any of their own modules. Several partners can contribute their modules, even with the same functionality, and it is easy to add a new module to the whole web-based distributed system. The user will decide which partner’s module to use in his own configuration or for a particular evaluation task. Evaluation can be done by any institution, able to access modules for evaluation without the need to install these modules locally. The platform will be used within the evaluation campaigns of different TTS modules and complete TTS systems carried-out by the ECESS consortium. The first remote-based evaluation campaign of text processing modules using the developed platform is foreseen for January 2008.