Method and Tool Innovations for Speech Science Education (M.A.T.I.S.S.E.) April 16-17, 1999 London, UK

An Interactive Course on Speech Synthesis

Rüdiger Hoffmann (1), Ulrich Kordon (1), Steffen Kürbis (1), Bettina Ketzmerick (2), and Klaus Fellbaum (2)

(1) Institut für Akustik und Sprachkommunikation, TU Dresden, Germany
(2) Brandenburg Technical University, Cottbus, Germany

We are presenting an interactive course on speech synthesis which is designed to support the education in speech communication. In the basic section, the fundamental principles of speech synthesis are explained. From this section, the user may select different branches which are explaining special topics in more detail. Two special sections are worked out until now: The first one is devoted to the crucial problem of

correct segmentation of the speech elements used for the concatenative synthesis. The user may select his own diphone segments from a given speech data base. The quality of the segments may be evaluated acoustically, and hints are given to avoid errors in cutting. Thus, the user will learn how to select the segments with good quality. The second special section offers a complete TTS system to the user for experimental purposes. The user may type any text, and he may observe how the system processes the text from the first linguistic preprocessing until the acoustic synthesis. The course is written in HTML and is designed for Internet application.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hoffmann, Rüdiger / Kordon, Ulrich / Kürbis, Steffen / Ketzmerick, Bettina / Fellbaum, Klaus (1999): "An interactive course on speech synthesis", 61-64 In MATISSE-1999, 61-64.