Prosodic Reading Tutor of Japanese, Suzuki-kun: The first and only educational tool to teach the formal Japanese

A text typed to a speech synthesizer is generally converted into its corresponding phoneme sequence on which various kinds of prosodic symbols are attached by a prosody prediction module. By using this module effectively, we build a prosodic reading tutor of Japanese, called Suzuki-kun, and it is provided as one feature of OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) [1, 2]. In Suzuki-kun, any Japanese text is converted into its reading (Hiragana sequence) on which the pitch pattern that sounds natural as Tokyo Japanese (the formal Japanese) is visualized as a smooth curve drawn by the F0 contour generation process model [3]. Further, the positions of accent nuclei and unvoiced vowels are illustrated. Suzuki-kun also reads that text out following the prosodic features that are visualized. Suzuki-kun has become the most popular feature of OJAD and so far, we gave 90 tutorial workshops of OJAD in 27 countries. After INTERSPEECH, we’ll give 6 workshops in the USA this year.