speech synthesizer online stephen hawking

For normal-hearing (NH) listeners, many TTS systems offer high intelligibility and naturalness for a variety of speaking styles in native languages. It is important that TTS systems have high intelligibility to be effective in AAC applications such as reading and communication aids.

However, it is possible to achieve a high quality TTS system with a smaller speech inventory by using sub-word or variable-length unit concatenation. 3,4 The concatenation approach can provide more natural sounding speech but requires a large speech inventory. In a typical TTS system, the targeted speech segments are either retrieved from data inventory (concatenation approach) 1,2 or synthesized using a source-filter model approach. Indeed, synthesized speech is almost unavoidable for voice menu systems in telecommunications.

Increasingly, synthesized speech is used for commercial communications. TTS systems can also be used in many educational and interactive dialogue situations. Some of the most important and useful TTS applications are reading and communication aids for the blind, deaf, and/or vocally handicapped individuals. The availability of high-quality TTS systems can provide accessibility to people with communication difficulties. The development of text-to-speech (TTS) systems has profoundly affected the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) as the intelligibility and naturalness of TTS systems has been steadily improved over time. While modern TTS systems offer educational and communication benefits to CI users and hearing-impaired individuals, the selection of synthesized voices should be carefully considered in education applications of TTS for hearing-impaired individuals, especially CI children, since poor intelligibility performance may affect language learning. Performance with each of the synthesized speech types was significantly correlated with performance with natural speech in CI users (p < 0.01 in all cases). CI listeners were highly sensitive to the “extra-atypical” synthesized emotional and accented speech. CI performance was significantly poorer with synthesized speech than with natural speech (p < 0.001).

The data showed that while modern Mandarin text-to-speech (TTS) systems can provide perfect speech intelligibility for NH listeners, overall intelligibility was much poorer for CI than for NH listeners. Five synthesized voices were selected to represent different talker genders (male, female, child), speaking rates (normal, slow), and speaking styles (emotional, accent). In this study, intelligibility of naturally produced and synthesized Mandarin speech was measured in Chinese CI listeners intelligibility was also measured in a control group of normal-hearing (NH) listeners. With natural speech, Chinese cochlear implant (CI) users have difficulty perceiving voice pitch cues important for lexical tone perception it is unclear whether this difficulty persists in Mandarin synthesized speech. Mandarin is a tonal language, and it is important to preserve lexical tone information in synthesized speech.

Speech synthesizer online stephen hawking