Problems in text-to-speech

Before delving into the details of how to perform text-to-speech conversion, we will first examine some of the fundamentals of communication in general. This chapter looks at the various ways in which people communicate and how communication varies depending on the situation and the means which are used. From this we can develop a general model which will then help us specify the text-to-speech problem more exactly in the following chapter. 

This chapter has introduced a model of communication and language that will serve as the basis for the next chapter, which looks at text-to-speech conversion in detail, and the subsequent chapters, which explore the various problems that occur and the techniques that have been developed to solve them. We should stress that what we have presented here is very much a model, that is a useful engineering framework in which to formulate, test and design text-to-speech systems. 

In this section we identify the main challenges in high quality text-to-speech. First we describe four areas which we believe are the key problems that have been recognised as the main goals of TTS system building (but note, the problems are not always described in this way). Then we go on to describe two additional problems, which are starting to attract more attention and which we believe will be central to TTS research in the future. 

Taylor has put together a book based on decades of research and the extraordinary progress over the past decade, which attempts to tie it all together and to document and explain the processes involved in a complete text-to-speech synthesis system. The first nine chapters of the book address the problem of converting printed text to a sequence of sonnd nnits (which characterise the aconstic properties of the resulting synthetic... 

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