Considerations In The Usage Of Text To Speech TTS In The Creation Of Natural Sounding Voice Enabled

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Considerations In The Usage Of Text To Speech
(TTS) In The Creation Of Natural Sounding Voice
Enabled Web Systems

• Bryan Duggan
• National College of Ireland
• Mark Deegan
• Dublin Institute of Technology
• 24 September 2003
• International Symposium on Information
• and Communication Technologies

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Overview

• Project background
• Definitions
• The importance of naturalness
• TTS (Text To Speech) approaches
• Evaluating TTS

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Definitions

• The Voice Enabled Web
• TTS
• Voice Portal
• VoiceXML
• W3C Speech Framework

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Naturalness

• User acceptance
• Passing The Turning Test
• Reeves Nass
• Personality, anthropromorphisms
• Competence
• Branding

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TTS Approaches

• Input, raw or tagged?
• Prosody, volume pitch
• SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language)
• Articulatory synthesis
• Formant synthesis
• Concatenative synthesis

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Evaluating TTS

• Intelligible natural?
• Flexibility vs quality
• Recommendation pre-record where possible

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Questions?