Speech synthesis by analogy: recent advances and results

The authors believe that the lack of success of computational text-to-speech systems when presented with a previously unseen word is these systems´ over-reliance on pronunciation rules. Therefore, the authors are developing a model of novel-word pronunciation based on analogy with known words which has its origins in psychological investigations of oral reading. A progress report is presented on implementing the model and previous results are extended by considering initial and final spaces as an integral part of the word. Various ways of handling these spaces in the analogy process are considered