Speech Synthesis for Portable Devices

A Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesiser is a computer-based system that should be able to read any text aloud, whether it was directly introduced in the computer by an operator or scanned and submitted to an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. This project presents the design and implementation of a speech synthesiser for portable devices. The TTS implementation was developed for J2ME. This development involved the conversion of a desktop TTS program by Sun Microsystems Inc. called FreeTTS. The implementation also involved the partial development of Java Sound API’s for J2ME on Windows CE. The TTS implementation on a PDA, apart from being platform independent produces the same sound quality with a far less powerful processor than its desktop counterparts. The implementation is written for J2ME, and is also compatible with JDK 1.3 on desktop computers. The program has been tested on a Dell Axim X5 PDA running Windows CE, and has been tested on a wide range of desktop computers and operating systems including: Windows 2000, Windows XP, FreeBSD and Linux.