Specifically, we add utterance-level prosody control to an existing neural HMM-based TTS system which is capable of stable, monotonic alignments for spontaneous speech. We objectively evaluate control accuracy and perform perceptual tests that demonstrate that prosody control does not degrade synthesis quality.

Specifically, we modify an existing neural HMM-based TTS system, which is capable of stable, mono-tonic alignments for spontaneous speech, and add utterance-level prosody control, so that the system can represent the wide range of natural variability in a spontaneous speech cor-pus.