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Abstract:
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This paper discusses the implementation details of a child friendly, good quality, English text-to-speech (TTS) system that is
phoneme-based, concatenative, easy to set up and use with little memory. Direct waveform concatenation and linear prediction
coding (LPC) are used. Most existing TTS systems are unit-selection based, which use standard speech databases available in
neutral adult voices.Here reduced memory is achieved by the concatenation of phonemes and by replacing phonetic wave files with
their LPC coefficients. Linguistic analysis was used to reduce the algorithmic complexity instead of signal processing techniques.
Sufficient degree of customization and generalization catering to the needs of the child user had been included through the
provision for vocabulary and voice selection to suit the requisites of the child. Prosody had also been incorporated. This inexpensive
TTS systemwas implemented inMATLAB, with the synthesis presented by means of a graphical user interface (GUI), thus making
it child friendly. This can be used not only as an interesting language learning aid for the normal child but it also serves as a speech
aid to the vocally disabled child. The quality of the synthesized speech was evaluated using the mean opinion score (MOS). |