HOMER: a voice-driven text-to-speech system for the blind

HOMER is a voice-driven text-to-speech system developed for blind or visually impaired persons for reading the Slovenian texts. Users can obtain texts from the special corpora organised on the computer network server at the information centre of the Association of the Slovenian Blind and Visually Impaired Persons. The system consists of three main modules. The text-to-speech module enables speech synthesis from an arbitrary Slovenian text input, the speech recognition module performs speaker independent isolated word recognition and the dialogue module controls the different tasks of the HOMER system and obtains texts from the source text corpora. Presently, the system runs under Linux and requires a Pentinum/133 PC with minimum 32 MB of RAM and an additional standard 16 bit sound card.