On Modelling Glottal Stop in Czech Text-to-Speech Synthesis

This paper deals with the modelling of glottal stop for the purposes of Czech text-to-speech synthesis. Phonetic features of glottal stop are discussed here and a phonetic transcription rule for inserting glottal stop into the sequences of Czech phones is proposed. Two approaches to glottal stop modelling are introduced in the paper. The first one uses glottal stop as a stand-alone phone. The second one models glottal stop as an allophone of a vowel. Both approaches are evaluated from the point of view of both the automatic segmentation of speech and the quality of the resulting synthetic speech. Better results are obtained when glottal stop is modelled as a stand-alone phone.