  In this project, we aim to build a Text-to-Speech system able to produce
speech with a controllable emotional expressiveness. We propose a methodology
for solving this problem in three main steps. The first is the collection of
emotional speech data. We discuss the various formats of existing datasets and
their usability in speech generation. The second step is the development of a
system to automatically annotate data with emotion/expressiveness features. We
compare several techniques using transfer learning to extract such a
representation through other tasks and propose a method to visualize and
interpret the correlation between vocal and emotional features. The third step
is the development of a deep learning-based system taking text and
emotion/expressiveness as input and producing speech as output. We study the
impact of fine tuning from a neutral TTS towards an emotional TTS in terms of
intelligibility and perception of the emotion.
