READER: DEVICE TO CONVERT WRITTEN/PRINTED TEXT TO SPEECH

Latin Text to Speech

In this paper we will describe our work on the creation of a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system for classical Latin. This system is suitable for any use, be it for accessibility or educational purposes, however we specifically conformed to the orthography used in the Amsterdam University Press online Latin-Dutch dictionary [2], such that it can be used as an extension of the dictionary in future. Much...

Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Text-To-Speech Intelligibility Across Speech Rates

A web-based listening test measured intelligibility across speech rate of 8 TTS systems and of a linearly timecompressed human speech reference voice. The synthesis systems included 2 independent representatives of each of the following 4 synthesis methods: formant, diphone concatenation, unit selection concatenation, and HMM. For each TTS system, a female and a male American English voice were...

Text-to-Speech Synthesis for Whispered Speech

Whispering is a modality of speech that is defined as an unvoiced mode of phonation in which the vocal cords do not vibrate, but are adducted sufficiently to create audible turbulence as the speaker exhales during speech [1]. Whispered speech production is found in most world languages and is considered to be one of linguistic universals [2]. The social role of whispering is to communicate info...

Communicating Text Structure to Blind People with Text-to-Speech

This paper presents the results of an experiment conducted with nine blind subjects for the evaluation of two audio restitution methods for headings, using Text-To-Speech. We used specialized audio and two voices to demarcate headings. This work is part of a research project which focuses on structural information accessibility for the blind in digital documents.