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Fifth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis
June 14-16, 2004 |
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Fifth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis
June 14-16, 2004 |
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This note describes a tentative solution to the problem of mixed language texts in TTS applications. The multilanguage modular architecture of Loquendo TTS has been exploited to provide a range of user options, allowing to guess the language of paragraphs/ phrase/words and to switch between voices in different languages, or between foreign accents of the same voice. This note focuses on a Phoneme Mapping algorithm enabling any TTS voice to speak all the languages provided by the system. The approach is quite general and language independent, entirely phonetics based. The obtained foreign pronunciation is by definition approximated but plausible and suitable to reading foreign words or phrases embedded in a text.
Bibliographic reference. Badino, Leonardo / Barolo, Claudia / Quazza, Silvia (2004): "Language independent phoneme mapping for foreign TTS", In SSW5-2004, 217-218.