WebMessenger: a new framework to produce multimedia content by combining synthesized speech and moving pictures in the WWW environment

To facilitate multimedia content production for Internet distribution, this paper proposes a new framework for generating multimedia content. Advantages of the framework are minimized amount of transmitted data and easy-to-update multimedia content. Key points are (1) to produce speech messages by a text-to-speech (TTS) system and (2) to produce moving pictures by concatenating templates from a set of moving pictures. To support the proposed framework, a speech design tool and a movie assign tool are introduced. Three kinds of contents have been produced using the proposed framework and informally evaluated. Important results are: (1) the transmitted data of WebMessenger is 120 times smaller than the full movie version of the content, (2) quality of speech synthesized by TTS is not sufficient and a speech design tool is necessary, (3) WebMessenger is 50% cheaper than human speech recording, (4) speech synthesis by combining manual and automatic methods is effective