Speech synthesis
Techniques used to generate synthetic speech:
- waveform concatenation
- formant synthesis
- articulatory synthesis
For a recent introduction to the field see
Keller 1994.
YorkTalk and IPOX use formant synthesis because:
- unlike waveform concatenation, it offers fine-grained control over speech output
- it is relatively easy to obtain data for a formant synthesizer
Question:
- Why is so little progress made in Speech Synthesis research?
Answers:
- too much engineering
- emphasis on robustness rather than completeness
- linguistic model based on SPE
- phonetic model based on segmental units
Solutions:
- computational linguistics
- speech generation rather than text-to-speech conversion
- linguistic model based on prosodic theory
- phonetic model based on overlapping constituents
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Arthur Dirksen / adirksen@prl.philips.nl / January 1995