This paper describes some aspects of the development of speech synthesis systems as communication aids. The work aims towards aids in which a range of accents and male and female voices can be provided. In order to minimize hardware, and also provide the user with a small number of recorded system messages, the proposed system exploits a single formant synthesizer device both for 'copy synthesis', and for the output of the text-to-speech software processes. The paper describes in some detail a software editor tool for defining formant and excitation data for the chosen phoneme set, and for examination of phoneme interpolation processes. This editor has been developed for the Philips PCF8200 single chip serial formant synthesizer device, though its functional principles may be applied to other devices and modules. The use of published and recorded data as sources of material for specification of target phoneme data for different voices is discussed. Keywords: speech synthesis, text to speech, communication aids.
Cite as: King, R.W. (1991) Tools and processes for developing low-cost and high-quality text-to-speech synthesis for communication aids. Proc. 2nd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1991), 325-329, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1991-87
@inproceedings{king91_eurospeech,
author={R. W. King},
title={{Tools and processes for developing low-cost and high-quality text-to-speech synthesis for communication aids}},
year=1991,
booktitle={Proc. 2nd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1991)},
pages={325--329},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1991-87}
}