GRAPHON-the Vienna speech systhesis system for arbitrary German text

The text-to-speech system GRAPHON synthesizes speech from German text in two steps: first, a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion program derives the correct pronunciation by applying a set of about 600 rules. A currently developed morphological analysis component is expected to yield proper decomposition and pronunciation of compounds, assignment of word stress and extraction of syntax related information required to generate sentence intonation. The second step is phonetic-acoustic synthesis. A simplified articulatory model is used to control a refined digital vocal tract synthesizer. Operation of the whole text-to-speech system should be real-time.