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Phoneme Approach For Text-to-Speech in SCIAM

Posted by Hemos on from the understanding-the-language dept.

jscribner writes "Scientific American is running a feature on IBM Research's Text-to-Speech technology. It discusses the current state of affairs in this field, and describes IBM's phoneme based 'Supervoices' approach. The IBM site provides a demonstration, allowing users to enter text to be rendered to speech, as well as providing several examples in other languages."

4 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. I was expecting better... by LeoDV · · Score: 5, Informative

    If memory serves me, I believe it was AT&T (?) that used to have a similar webpage with near-perfect text-to-speech, which is hardly the case of this project.

    What's so special about it?

    1. Re:I was expecting better... by Rubyflame · · Score: 5, Informative

      Used to? Still does! It's called "AT&T Natural Voices," and there's an online demo.

      --

      All it takes is nukes and nerves.
  2. AT&T have been doing this for a while! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you visit here:
    http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/

    You'll find AT&T's version a whole lot better. The main problem with voice synthesis is smoothing of phoneme edges, where if it is done too aggressively the speech synthesis can sound too "lumpy".

    The other thing is, speech synthesis via phoneme's is very basic practise indeed! I remember having a Currah Speech module for my ZX Spectrum (1982 home computer) - and the first thing you were taught about was phenomes. I'm not entirely sure whats new about this IBM product. It's basically not that much evolved from the mid-90's.

  3. Open Source Speech Synthesis by wzrd2002 · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is already freely available open source speech synthesis application for both linux and windows, called Festival created by The University of Edinburgh