A system for converting teletext into speech

Both in Europe and the USA there is a significant growth in the availability and use of videotext services. Videotext covers both viewdata and teletext. Teletext is in far greater use than viewdata, particularly in Britain and the rest of Europe. With the growth in the use of personal computers, the possibility is arising to combine the data capacity of teletext with the flexibility of computers. One option available is to provide speech output. The system described here is a research study for converting teletext into speech. The study examined constrained text - the teletext weather information. This enabled most of the research effort to be concentrated on the synthesis sections. Figure 1 gives an overall view of the system. Modularity was of prime concern to allow flexibility in altering the composition of each section. Most of the software is written in C, with the parser written in BCPL. The system runs on a DEC PDP 11/60.