Second ESCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis September 12-15, 1994 Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY, USA

Evaluation of a TTS-System Intended for the Synthesis of Names

Karim Belhoula (1), Marianne Kugler (2), Regina Krüger (2), Hans-Wilhelm Rühl (2)

(1) Lehrstuhl fiir allgemeine Elektrotechnik & Akustik, Ruhr-Universität-Bochum, Germany
(2) Philips Kommunikations Industrie AG, Nürnberg, Germany

With the integration of new services into the telecommunication networks, there is an increasing demand for automatic announcement and information systems employing oral communication. Since many telephone-network applications use large databases, synthetic speech is ideal for this purpose. One particular problem in speech synthesis is however, the pronunciation of proper names, because most tts-systems were initially developed to convert standard vocabulary. Moreover, names can be of very diverse etymological origins, their pronunciation often shows a significant deviation from the German standard letter-to-sound rules. Focusing on the demand of such new applications, we have developed a tts-system called PHRITTS in a joint project involving the Ruhr-Universiat Bochum and the Philips Kommunikations Industrie (PKIAG, Nürnberg, Germany). Since we are principally interested in good pronunciation and consequently producing highly intelligable names, we carried out a test to investigate how grapheme-to-phoneme conversion performs. This paper provides an overview of the TTS-system PHRITTS and reports the method and results of the evaluation test.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Belhoula, Karim / Kugler, Marianne / Krüger, Regina / Rühl, Hans-Wilhelm (1994): "Evaluation of a TTS-system intended for the synthesis of names", In SSW2-1994, 211-214.