A multilingual text-to-speech system

Author

Javkin, Hector ; Hata, Kazue ; Mendes, Lucio ; Pearson, Steven ; Ikuta, Hisayo ; Kaun, Abigail ; DeHaan, Gregory ; Jackson, Alan ; Zimmermann, Beatriz ; Wise, Tracy ; Henton, Caroline ; Gow, Merrilyn ; Matsui, Kenji ; Hara, Noriyo ; Kitano, Masaki ; Lin,

Author_Institution

Panasonic Technol. Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, USA

fYear

1989

fDate

23-26 May 1989

Firstpage

242

Abstract

An MITalk-based real-time system for unrestricted English, Japanese, and Chinese text-to-speech synthesis has been developed with high observed intelligibility (94% for word recognition in English and 70.8% for 119 Japanese monosyllables). The approach in making the system multilingual has been simple yet effective: in developing the Japanese and Chinese systems, the authors have used the hardware and the program structure and tools of the system originally developed for English, but have otherwise kept the development of the different languages separate. In addition to substantial improvements and modifications of the original MITalk, two major innovations in the system are (1) the method for controlling the glottal pulse and (2) the Phoenix development tools, which combine a powerful and flexible parameter editor with programs for acoustic analysis

Keywords

speech recognition; speech synthesis; Chinese; Japanese; Japanese monosyllables; MITalk-based real-time system; Phoenix development tools; acoustic analysis; glottal pulse; multilingual text-to-speech system; parameter editor; text-to-speech synthesis; unrestricted English; word recognition; Acoustic pulses; Control systems; Hardware; Laboratories; Natural languages; Real time systems; Speech processing; Speech synthesis; Synthesizers; Technological innovation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1989. ICASSP-89., 1989 International Conference on

Conference_Location

Glasgow

ISSN

1520-6149

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.1989.266410

Filename

266410