Text-to-speech system for Greek

A modular software TTS (text-to-speech) system for Greek with good intelligibility and quality of speech and the possibility of being further improved by extending its linguistic knowledge is presented. The system has several peculiarities in comparison to most systems for other languages, combining the advantages of formant synthesis with those of diphone synthesis. In addition to the text normalizer (including numbers) and the sophisticated text preprocessor, the system uses composite speech segments besides phonemes which are concatenated, using a dynamically-adjusted-in-range, sigmoid function. The segments are coded in a novel scheme aiding the rules which manipulate voice onset and duration times. A declined line with its ending part dependent on the punctuation mark or function word, which fluctuates according to the stressed points and unvoiced (voiced) consonant and plosive locations, controls the intonation of the input text. The system is to be improved by incorporating elaborate prosodic rules resulting from syntactic analysis of the text