Text-to-speech conversion technology

The historical and theoretical bases of contemporary high-performance text-to-speech (TTS) systems and their current design are discussed. The major elements of a TTS system are described, with particular reference to vocal tract models. The stages involved in the process of converting text into speech parameters are examined, covering text normalization, word pronunciation, prosodies, phonetic rules, voice tables, and hardware implementation. Examples are drawn mainly from Berkeley Speech Technologies´ proprietary text-to-speech system, T-T-S, but other approaches are indicated briefly.<>