Speech synthesis

Concept

Speech synthesis is the conversion of arbitrary input text into machine generated speech. The purpose of speech synthesis technology is to make the machine have the ability to speak and understand human speech similar to human. If speech recognition technology is to let the computer learn to “listen” to people’s words and convert the input speech signal into words, then speech synthesis technology is to let the computer program “say” the words we input, and convert any input text into speech output.

Applications

• Automatic time, alarm and station reporting;
• Human-computer interaction;
• Voice consultation response;
• Text to speech auto conversion(TTS): Commercialization in the early 1990s（DECTalk…）;
• Smart toys,intelligent instrument

Process

The process of speech synthesis mainly includes the following steps. Firstly, the input text is combined with dictionary planning for language processing. Then, the prosodic processing was carried out on the processed results. Then, the output of the previous step was synthesized and concatenated by combining the speech database. Finally, the final speech output result was obtained.

Classification

• Research technology.Parameter synthesis of speech organ.Synthesis of channel model parameters.Waveform editing and synthesis
• Synthesis strategy.Spectrum Approximation synthesis.Waveform splicing synthesis

Directions of Development

• Improve the naturalness of synthesized speech;
• Enrich the expressiveness of synthesized speech;
• Reduce the complexity of speech synthesis technology;
• Multilingual speech synthesis.

Your task

Tell me about a real life application of speech synthesis that you are interested in and what you think about it.

*Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.