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First Implementation of VHML on the Java Text-to-Speech Synthesiser

Current text-to-speech technology is able to produce highly understandable speech using concatenative synthesisers. The presence of emotion in speech is known to improve communication as it provides more naturalness and makes it sound more human-like. The work presented here describes the construction of a structure that provides emotion to the FreeTTS text-to-speech synthesiser, in the new area of text-to-speech synthesis in Java. The Virtual Human Markup Language is used to control emotion as well as prosody in the synthetic speech. The implementation of a markup language, VHML in particular, within FreeTTS is also described. A questionnaire based evaluation provides information on how well the emotions in the synthetic speech were recognised and how the recognition of these emotions compares to similar research in the field of emotion in speech.