Promoting Intercultural Awareness through Native-to-Foreign Speech Accent Conversion

Abstract

Large difference in pronunciation between languages often causes technical and mental difficulty in listening comprehension as well as in speech production. In spite of the rationale provided for native speakers to support non-native speakers in international contexts, negative reactions to foreign accents are common. To promote intercultural awareness in communication, we implemented a prototype system to convert native speech to have a foreign accent by combining speech recognition and text-to-speech engines.

Link / Demo

Pronunciation converter Windows 7 Ultimate/Enterprise/8 or over

Publications

  1. Takeshi Nishida, "Promoting Intercultural Awareness through Native-to-Foreign Speech Accent Conversion", Proc. CABS 2014, pp.83-86 (August, 2014).

in Japanese

  1. 西田 健志, "ネイティブ英語発話の日本人風の発音への変換による国際的な意識の促進", WISS2013 論文集, pp.1-6 (December, 2013).