Today e-Learning is an important educational tool with multiple benefits. However, to be suitable for a large audience the learning objects, courses, and other forms of e-Learning content should be easy to use for all students, regardless of disability. This paper describes problems often encountered by a blind person using screen reader and voice synthesizer when using e-Learning systems, and ...

In this paper, we investigate the predictive power of different prosodic factorization schemes with respect to pitch movement. We will use this to propose an extension of a standard diphone database with diphones that have been recorded in different prosodic contexts. The goal of this research is to reduce the amount of pitch modification required, thereby improving the segmental quality of the...

Given that state of the art speech synthesis systems have already reached a high naturalness level, it is time to move to talking speech from the actual read speech framework. For this purpose it is thus necessary to investigate how disfluencies can be included in speech synthesis and even increase its naturalness. This paper builds on a previously presented work and focuses on finding a local ...

We give an overview of multilingual speech synthesis using the IPOX system. The first part discusses work in progress for various languages: Tashlhit Berber, Urdu and Dutch. The second part discusses a multilingual phonological grammar, which can be adapted to a particular language by setting parameters and adding languagespecific details.

This paper presents an intonation model which determines intonation contours over intonation phrases. The model is described by four elements: communicative type of an intonation phrase; number of accent groups in it; position of the nuclear accent group in it; and set of target intonation points. Individualization of the model is based on semiautomatic analysis of speaker database. The model w...

The temporal organization of discourse has produced a great deal of works in several languages pointing to different aims: from studies where the identification of cues about the planning of linguistic message is treated to studies in which duration models for text-to-speech systems are proposed. This work is a first step towards the description of Catalan vowel duration. Considering the Catala...

This paper describes a new generic text-to-speech synthesis system, developed in the scope of the Tecnovoz Project. Although it was primarily targeted at speech synthesis in European Portuguese, its modular architecture and flexible components allows its use for different languages. We also provide a survey on the development of the language resources needed by the TTS.

Processing spontaneous speech deals with problems that are influenced by the several facts. This paper reports an investigation of the production of real and non-words in two normal speaker groups. Group 1 consists of 10 young people 5 women and 5 men (mean age 23 years) and group 2 consists of 5 older women and 5 older men(mean age 52 years). The speech material used in study consisted of two ...