ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Speech Input/Output Assessment and Speech Databases Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands September 20-23, 1989

Evaluation of the Suitability of Dutch Text-To-Speech Conversion for Application in a Digital Daily Newspaper

Renée van Bezooijen

Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In this contribution an experiment is described in which the suitability of Dutch text-to-speech conversion for application in a Digital Daily Newspaper (DDN) for the blind was evaluated. This was done by presenting a number of synthesized and naturally spoken newspaper texts to a group of visually handicapped via a taperecorder. Results show that present text-to-speech conversion for Dutch yields speech which is reasonably comprehensible at the text level, but that further improvement is possible and necessary. The subjects' opinion about the introduction of a DDN varies, but it is argued that responses would have been more positive if the subjects had been able to experience the advantages of a DDN in practice.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bezooijen, Renée van (1989): "Evaluation of the suitability of dutch text-to-speech conversion for application in a digital daily newspaper", In SIOA-1989, Vol.2, 223-226.