Govorec (Speaker) - Slovenian text-to-speech system for telecommunication applications

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems for major world languages like the Slovenian language, lack quality TTS synthesis. At the "Jozef Stefan" Institute a system called Speaker (Govorec) has been developed. It is capable of the automatic conversion of any Slovienian text into speech. The different phases of the synthesis task are performed by several sequentially operating independent modules: text analysis, prosody generation and segmental concatenation. The system was first implemented in the EMA employment agent, which provides information about available jobs in Slovenia and is now used by members of the Slovenian Foundation for the Blind and Visually Impaired. The system was awarded with the first price for innovation in the field of life improvements for handicapped people. Currently, several leading Slovenian telecommunication companies are testing the system for providing information (e-mail, SMS, weather reports, traffic information) through mobile phones.