Next thursday, January 22nd 2008, Daniel Erro will give a seminar with the title "Voice conversion: state of the art, recent improvements and remaining challenges" at 3pm in the França Auditorium.

Abstract:
Voice conversion, which consists of modifying the voice of a speaker to be perceived as that of a different specific speaker, is probably the most complex type of voice transformation. Its development opens the door to very interesting applications: building multi-speaker or multi-emotional speech synthesis systems, creating special voices or virtual clones of famous people for videogames, films, toys, chat rooms, speaking aids for people suffering from voice pathologies, etc. During the seminar, I will give an overview of the voice conversion world. I will talk about the techniques applied by state-of-the-art systems and I will focus mainly on the work carried out at UPC to overcome some of the traditional limitations of voice conversion: the quality degradation and the lack of flexibility in terms of training requirements. Finally, I will list some of the future challenges for researchers in this area and I will show some preliminary results of my current work at the Aholab group (UPV/EHU).

Biograhy:
Erro received the Telecommunication Engineering degree from the Public University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain, 2003) and the PhD degree from the UPC (Barcelona) in june 2008. He is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Aholab group (University of the Basque Country, Bilbao). He is interested in everything related to voice transformation and conversion, signal models for speech and music waveform analysis, modification and reconstruction, and speech synthesis.

Erro's website