世木 寛之

The 'Kabushiki Shikyo' program broadcast on NHK Radio 2 reports on the daily closing prices and net changes of about 830 stocks listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Reading out the numerical values without making mistakes within the allotted broadcast time can be extremely difficult for the announcers. We have therefore developed an automatic broadcast system for stock-price bulletins, which uses numerical speech synthesis and automatic speech-rate conversion. Our system has been used in experimental digital terrestrial radio broadcasts since October 2006 and also used in NHK radio 2 since March 2010. This article describes the generation of texts to build the speech waveform database, the mechanism used to synthesize numerical speech via the database, and the evaluation of naturalness for the synthesized speech samples.