20 Jul
2006
20 Jul
'06
11:39 a.m.
My only claim to being *possibly* on-topic is the age
of the article (1974) and the fact that it inspired
many of the early phoneme-driven speech synthesizers
(Votrax, etc.).
Does anyone have access to a suitably good engineering
library with a copy of:
McIlroy, M D, "Synthetic English Speech by Rule",
Bell Telephone Labs, CSTR #14, 1973 (though I have
also seen it referenced as 1974!)
or:
Ainsworth, W A, "A System for Converting English Text
to Speech", IEEE Trans Audio & Electroacoustics AU-21 #3
pp 288-290, 1973
The former is far more interesting to me than the
latter :-(
Just maybe I have either or both; I'll check when I get home.
You know about the old post on net.sources?
Have a look at some of the stuff in here:
http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/text2speech/
It's the same vintage, may be of interest.
Also, I hacked the navy code around a bit to make it more
accurate and to assist with using a large phonetic
word list. And to parameterize the tables from an editable
data file rather than being hard coded in the C source.
The algorithm is considerably improved if you subject the words
to TeX's hyphenation algorithm before applying the grapheme->phoneme
rewrite rules. Hyphenation points roughly correspond to phoneme
boundaries, and stop words like haphazard from sounding half-assed.
Graham