The alternative approach involves breaking down the written words into their graphemes (written component units, typically made from the individual letters or syllables that make up a word) and then generate phonemes that correspond to them using a set of simple rules. But practically, it’s quite harder than it sounds. Theoretically, if a computer has a dictionary of words and phonemes, then all it needs to do is to read a word and look it up in the list, and then read out the corresponding phonemes. For each word, they would need a list of the phonemes that make up its sound.
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Every computer needs is a huge alphabetical list of words and details of how to pronounce each word. Once they figure out the words that need to be spoken, next the speech synthesizer has to generate the speech sounds that make up these words. But if it can understand that the preceding text entirely has a different meaning, by recognizing the spelling (“I have a cell phone”), then it can make a reasonable guess that “I sell the pen” is likely correct. The word “sell” can be pronounced as “cell”, so a sentence such as “I sell the flower” is problematic for a speech synthesizer. Pre-processing also handles homographs, these are the words pronounced in different ways but the meaning is different for each word. If there were a decimal point before the numbers (“.953”), then it would be read differently as “nine fifty-three.” This is the reason they use statistical probability techniques or neural networks to arrive at the most likely pronunciation. While humans can figure out the pronunciation based on the way the text is written, computers generally don’t have that ability to do that. For example the number 1953 might refer to several items, a year or a time, or a padlock combination each of these is read out will sound slightly differently. Elements like numbers, dates, times, abbreviations, acronyms, and special characters need to be turned into words. In Pre-processing it’s about going through the text and then cleaning it up so the computer makes fewer mistakes when it reads the words aloud. The initial stage of speech synthesis, is generally called pre-processing or normalization, it is everything about reducing ambiguity: it’s about narrowing down the many different ways a person could read a piece of text into the one that’s the most appropriate. There are 3 stages in which speech synthesis works text to words, words to phonemes, and phonemes to sound. With the rise of usage of digital services and the increase in dependency on voice recognition, the text-to-speech engine is gaining popularity. It is not only to have machines talk simply but also to make a sound like humans of different ages and gender. It is an output where a computer reads out the word loud in a simulated voice it is often called text-to-speech. A speech synthesizer is a computerized voice that turns a written text into a speech.
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These should bring improved possibilities of output modelling as well as the creation of less memory-intensive models.Speech Synthesis software are transforming the work culture of different industry sectors.
However, simultaneously experiments are being conducted using neural networks (already successfully used in Machine Translation). The current TTS version is based on the concatenative synthesis approach which still delivers more natural-sounding results and moreover allows post-editing to achieve perfect output. The voices are optimized for the purposes of language learning but they are also fully exploitable for other types of applications. In cooperation with the University of West Bohemia, we have managed to improve the quality of the audio output to such a degree that it can virtually replace real human voices recorded in a studio. Lingea has been engaging in this field for almost 2 years now, especially in relation to foreign language learning.Ĭurrently, we have available a set of 6 different voices for English, German and Russian. It is used to automatically read texts, in automotive satellite navigation devices but also in language learning. Speech Synthesis also called TTS ( Text-to-speech) virtually deals with computer-generated simulation of natural human speech.