Croatian visual speech synthesis

Virtual human characters are being used in a variety of applications, such as computer games, movies, tutoring software and virtual guides. Virtual characters interact with persons using speech and gestures. In some applications speech can be pre-recorded and synchronized with animation to produce a believable virtual character. However in many cases an ability to produce synthesized speech synchronized with facial animation is necessary or desireable, for example in cases the output text is not known in advance, for ability to choose among various voices, or because recording natural speech is too time consuming and expensive for a given application. This paper presents the effort to integrate and extend existing text-to-speech system for Croatian language and a face and body animation system to produce a system capable of real-time visual text-to-speech synthesis for Croatian language.