The development of the Greek Text-To-Speech (TTS) system by NTUA is based on the method of concatenative synthesis and follows the Bell Labs approach to this technique. Concatenative synthesis is one of the simplest methods for speech synthesis and at the same time bypasses most of the problems encountered by articulatory and formant synthesis techniques. The method relies on designing and crea...

Current lexica for speech technology typically contain much redundancy, while omitting useful information. A comparison with lexica in other media and for other purposes is instructive, as it highlights some features we may borrow for text-to-speech and speech recognition lexica. We describe some aspects of the new lexicon we are producing, Combilex, whose structure and implementation is specif...

During conversation, spoken utterances occur in rich acoustic contexts, including speech produced by our interlocutor(s) and speech we produced ourselves. Prosodic characteristics of the acoustic context have been known to influence speech perception in a contrastive fashion: for instance, a vowel presented in a fast context is perceived to have a longer duration than the same vowel in a slow c...

The goal of a recently started research project of OVR is to develop a system to automate part of its dialogues now held by human operators at its call centres. To achieve a well thought-out design of such a system both an analysis of the current dialogues and an experiment determining which form of dialogues would be favoured by humans were started. In this paper we will emphasize the analysis...

In this paper we present our initial attempt to link speech processing technology, namely continuous speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and artificial talking head, with text processing techniques in order to design a Czech demonstration system that allows for informal voice chatting with virtual characters. Legendary novel figure Svejk is the first personality who can be interviewed ...

This paper analyzes some of the results of the use of PhonePass, a telephone-based test of spoken English that uses automatic speech recognition. It finds that the test provides sensitive measures of speech rate and phonetic accuracy.

This paper examines a method for formant parameter extraction from a labeled single speaker database for use in a formantparameter diphone-concatenation speech synthesis system. This procedure commences with an initial formant analysis of the labelled database, which is then used to obtain formant (F1-F5) probability spaces for each phoneme. These probability spaces guide a more careful speaker...

As part of the Text-to-Speech research at Edinburgh University's Centre for Speech Technology Research (EU_CSTR), a modular, linguistic knowledge based text-to-phoneme system has been implemented in Prolog. Its design considerations, the structure and coverage of its rule bases and typical output from the system are described in the body of this paper.

A phonetic dictionary is an essential component of a speech recognition system or a speech synthesis system. Our work targets the generation of an automatic pronunciation dictionary for the Tunisian Arabic, in particular in the field of rail transport. To do this, we created two tools of phonetic vowelized and unvowelized words in the Tunisian Arabic. The proposed method to automatically genera...

Listeners identify talkers more accurately in their na­ tive language than an unknown, foreign language in a phenomenon called the language-familiarity effect. However, the psychological basis for this effect re­ mains unknown. Some have suggested that the linguistic processes involved in speech perception and comprehension facilitate native­language talker identification. Others have argued th...