Communication aid for non-vocal people using corpusbased concatenative speech synthesis

This paper reports on the development of Chatako-AID, a communication aid for non-vocal people using corpus-based cocatenative speech synthesis by creating a speech corpus especially designed for such use. The concept of Chatako-AID; synthesis with the user’s voice, which makes use of precomposed texts, is highly appreciated by the target user. This confirms that the recording of a minimum set of phonetically balanced sentences is insufficient for speech synthesis in the proposed method and that a combination of the above recording and a recording of well-read continuous-text material produces more natural sounded synthesised speech.