Report 2004 to ISCA

SynSIG: The ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech Synthesis

Annual Report 2004

1. Purpose and Motivation
   • Promote interest in speech synthesis (TTS, CTS, related disciplines)
   • Platform for exchanging information on recent research developments
   • Sponsor meetings and workshops
   • Resources for speech synthesis (corpora, tools, software, synthesized data, publications)
   • 194 supporters, as of June 2004.
2. Terms of Reference
   • Evaluation: to serve researchers, developers and customers
   • Collaborative experiments: international, multilingual, interdisciplinary
   • Resources: research and teaching
   • Student exchanges
   • Standardization: interdisciplinary communication and cooperation
3. Steering Committee (through June 2004, elected in 2002)
   • Chairman: Bernd M\x{FFFD}bius, University of Stuttgart, Germany
   • Vice Chairman and ISCA Liaison Representative: Nick Campbell, ATR, Japan
   • Secretary and Treasurer: Gerard Bailly, ICP Grenoble, France
4. Activities: Conferences, Workshops, and Publications
   • sOc'2003, Grenoble, France: Smart objects conference: communicating with objects, agents and environnements (org. G. Bailly)
     • 46 papers, 8 invited papers, 14 demos
   • Internat. Congr. Phonet. Sci. 2003, Barcelona, Spain:
     • 23 papers, 17 posters in speech synthesis sessions
   • Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland:
     • SynSIG presentation in Hot Topics session (org. V. Hazan)
     • 24 papers, 38 posters in speech synthesis sessions
     • 1 invited talk on spoken language output (R. Moore)
   • Voqual 2003, Geneva, Switzerland: ITRW on Voice Quality: functions, analysis and synthesis (org. C. d'Alessandro)
     • 5 papers, 1 hands-on session on VQ synthesis
   • Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan:
     • 7 papers, 18 posters in speech synthesis sessions
     • 2 invited talks on synthesis of expressive speech (B. Granstr\x{FFFD}m, Y. Sagisaka)
   • 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA, USA:
     • 15 papers, 29 posters, 2 tutorials
     • SynSIG meeting (steering committee and members)
   • Questionnaire "Future of Speech Synthesis":
     • results presented at Eurospeech 2003
   • Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Speech & Audio Processing on Expressive Speech Synthesis (G. Bailly, N. Campbell, co-eds.)
5. Activities: Web-Based Services
   • SynSIG web site reworked and moved to [1]
   • New SynSIG mailing list at [2]
     • moderated discussion list
     • membership subscription and maintenance service
   • Teaching and education resources web site [3]
     • course materials and slides
     • collection of historical photos and images
     • annotated list of links to software tools, tutorials, etc.
6. Finances
   • SynSIG did not incur any financial expenditures nor carry out any other financial transactions. The initial ISCA grant to SynSIG has not been asked for so far.
   • Proceeds from the Speech Synthesis Workshop 1998 at Jenolan Caves are being held in a bank account by ISCA.

June 2004

The SynSIG Steering Committee:

Gérard Bailly,
Nick Campbell,
Bernd Moebius