Emotion Identification for Evaluation of Synthesized Emotional Speech

In this paper, we propose to evaluate the quality of emotional speech synthesis by means of an automatic emotion identification system. We test this approach using five different parametric speech synthesis systems, ranging from plain non-emotional synthesis to full re-synthesis of pre-recorded speech. We compare the results achieved with the automatic system to those of human perception tests. While preliminary, our results indicate that automatic emotion identification can be used to assess the quality of emotional speech synthesis, potentially replacing time consuming and expensive human perception tests