Automatic synthesis from ordinary english test

We summarize work between 1969 and 1972 in a continuing project With two objectives: to produce acceptable synthetic speech directly from English text; and to demonstrate with speech synthesis a detailed model of human articulatory movements. Work in the four-year period has yielded moderately accurate rules for predicting the occurrence of pauses and lesser breaks in the sentence; rules for vowel duration in many conditions, not just primary stressed syllables immediately before a pause; rules for contextual variations of consonants; and rules for durational and other allophonic variations on consonants at word boundaries. Presently we are studying natural speech to quantify and add detail to these rules, and we are working to extend the vocal tract model to closer agreement with human articulation and vocal cord control.