As a South Korean myself, I was very hyped for the Korean XLS. However, it showed some flaws.
The biggest flaw is from the s and s_t phonemes, which stand for Korean ㅅ and ㅆ, respectively. By the Korean phonetics, these phonemes are supposed to assimilate into the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative, or [ɕ] in IPA, when followed by i or j. Though Uni expressed this assimilation well in her demos, other (non-Korean) voicebanks don’t do that well.
Here’s my proposed remedy:
Add s\ and s\_t phonemes for palatalized ㅅ and ㅆ, respectively.
Add the H (or [ɥ] in IPA) phoneme. With this phoneme, ㅛ, ㅠ, and ㅟ should be H o, H u, and H i respectively.
I don’t have a Korean library, but I was rather surprised at how poorly the libraries I have performed in Korean. With other languages there’s a clear accent when they sing in their non-native language, and that’s to be expected, but the phonemes at least are correct. I don’t feel like that’s the case with Korean.
I’ve just spotted another mistake of SynthV’s Korean phonemes. Namely, the lack of p_h, t_h, and k_h.
Currently, SynthV Korean employs the phonemes p, t, and k for both the onsets ㅍ, ㅌ, and ㅋ, and the codas ㅂ, ㄷ, and ㄱ. This is wrong, both phonologically and phonetically.
My suggested remedy is to simply add the phonemes p_h, t_h, and k_h.
EDIT: After some experiment, it seems better to tweak the codas instead. So basically, add :p, :t, and :k.
They should add a drop down menu selection for accents. That way they could pave the way for regional accents like from US, UK, Australia, specific cities etc, while also giving them a way to integrate a generic “system override” selection for accent. So you could override the character’s baked in accent, with a more generic one attached to the selected language.
As anyone might’ve already noticed, SynthV’s Korean phoneme 4, or [ɾ] in IPA, doesn’t quite sound like a tap, especially when followed by a diphthong. This may just indicate that SynthV’s AI isn’t quite trained well, but I don’t see a way to edit my Korean Tweaks script accordingly. Ugh…
and Korean 4 might get a bit liquid-y in some contexts, even in natural spoken Korean, so I think dx is a good way to force the more harsher sounding version
dx is an English phoneme. It’s not always usable in every context because English vowels don’t quite match with Korean’s. English lacks an /a/, lacks an /o/, lacks an /ɯ/…
