This paper describes experimental results on whole word HMM-based speech recognition of connected digits in Japanese with special focus on the training data size and the "sheep and goats" problem. The training data comprises 757000 digits uttered by 2000 speakers, while the testing data comprises 399000 digits uttered by 1700 speakers. The best word error rate for unknown length strings was 1.64% obtained using context dependent HMMs. The word error rate was measured for various subsets of the training data reduced both in the number of speakers (s) and the number of utterances per speakers (u). As a result, an empirical formula of s[{min(0.62s0.75, u)}0.74 + {max(0, u-0.62s0.75)}0.27] = D(Ew) was developed, where Ew and D(Ew) designate word error rate and effective data size, respectively. Analyses were conducted on several aspects of the low performance speakers accounting for the major part of recognition errors. Attempts were also made to improve their recognition performance. It was found that 33% of the low performance speakers are improved to the normal level by speaker clustering centered around each low performance speaker.

The authors developed a portable Japanese text-to-speech system using a pocket-sized formant speech synthesizer. It consists of a linguistic processor and an acoustic processor. The linguistic processor runs on an MS-DOS personal computer and has functions to determine readings and prosodic information for input sentences written in kana-kanji-mixed style. New techniques, such as minimization of a cost function for phrases, rare-compound flag, semantic information, information of reading selection and restriction by associated particles, are used to increase the accuracy of readings and accent positions. The accuracy of determining readings and accent positions is 98.6% for sentences in newspaper articles. It is possible to use the linguistic processor through an interface library which has also been developed by the authors. Consequently, it has become possible not only to convert whole texts stored in text files but also to convert parts of sentences sent by the interface library sequentially, and the readings and prosodic information are optimized for the whole sentence at one time. The acoustic processor is custom-made hardware, and it has adopted new techniques, for the improvement of rules for vowel devoicing, control of phoneme durations, control of the phrase components of voice fundamental frequency and the construction of the acoustic parameter database. Due to the above-mentioned modifications, the naturalness of synthetic speech generated by a Klatt-type formant speech synthesizer was improved. On a naturalness test it was rated 3.61 on a scale of 5 points from 0 to 4.