An application of the linear prediction technique to efficient coding of speech segments

Summary form only given, as follows. The paper deals with the application of linear prediction technique to the speech synthesis of both italian and german languages by Standard Speech Reproducing Units (SSRU), it is by combining elementary speech segments of standardized charac teristics extracted fron utterances of native speakers. The nain feature of the method presented is the possibility of synthesizing in a higly intelligible form any nessage of such languages with a very limited amount of data. So far the use of linear predictive coding of the previously realized SSRU sets allowed a memory occupation less than 16 kb for the synthesis of italian language and less than 32 k-bytes for the combined synthesis of italian and german languages. The data flow rate is about 1 kb/s. A key property of the code with respect to methods previously used (i.e. simple concatenation of original segments ) relies in the possibility of greatly enhancing the naturalness of the synthesized speech by varying pitch, amplitude and duration of the synthetic segments. Further, the quantitative rules obtained for generating the SSRU´s are expected to be useful, at least as a preliminary investigation tool, for synthesis-by-rule.