Speech synthesis selects units by minimizing target and concatenation costs.

Evidence

An important concept is the target cost, which measures how well a candidate unit from the database matches the required unit. It is basically a distance measure. Similarly, the concatenation cost defines how well two units combine when presented successively. This evaluation can be performed using a specially weighted decision tree, where the cost is to be minimized. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2246

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the two cost metrics (target and concatenation cost) that drive unit-selection synthesis.