Speaker Characterization, Speaker Adaptation and Voice Conversion

This paper discusses recent advances in and perspectives of research on speaker-dependent-feature extraction from speech waves, automatic speaker identification and verification, speaker adaptation in speech recognition, and voice conversion. Both supervised and unsupervised speaker adaptation algorithms for speech recognition have recently been actively investigated, and remarkable progress has been achieved in this field. Improving synthesized speech quality by adding natural characteristics of voice individuality, and converting synthesized voice individuality from one speaker to another, are as yet little exploited research fields to be studied in the near future.