Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A system used for this purpose is termed a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. Speech synthesis systems are often called text-to-speech (TTS) systems in reference to their ability to convert text into speech. However, systems exist that instead render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic ...

OBJECTIVE Tympanostomy tubes (TTs) are commonly rendered nonfunctional by mucus plug formation. The purpose of this study was to determine whether an in vitro model could be developed to assess TT plug formation with results consistent with human trials. STUDY DESIGN An ear chamber was designed to mimic middle ear air and mucus flow conditions in post-TT otorrhea. TT occlusion was tested and ...

This paper reports a study of unit analysis for concatenative TTS, which usually has an inventory of hundreds of thousand of voice units. It is known that the quality of synthesis units is especially critical to the quality of resulting corpus-based TTS system. This research focuses on the analysis of a Chinese Cantonese unit inventory, which has been built earlier for open vocabulary Chinese C...

This paper describes a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based (TTS) system and prosody based (TTS) system for producing natural sounding synthetic speech in Tamil language. The (HMM) based system consists of two phases such as training and synthesis. Tamil speech is first parameterized into spectral and excitation features using Glottal Inverse Filtering (GIF). An emotions present in the input text is...

BACKGROUND Thyroid hormones play an important role in lipid metabolism. Overt hypothyroidism is known to be associated with increased lipid profiles, but the effect of subclinical hypothyroidism (SCH) on lipid profile remains controversial. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to assess the association between thyroid disorders and serum lipid levels. MATERIALS AND METHODS The present study...

In this paper, four speech corpora collected in the Speech Lab of NCTU in recent years are discussed. They include a Mandarin treebank speech corpus, a Min-Nan speech corpus, a Hakka speech corpus, and a Chinese-English mixed speech corpus. Currently, they are used separately to develop a corpus-based Mandarin TTS system, a Min-Nan TTS system, a Hakka TTS system, and a Chinese-English bilingual...

AIMS Clinical presentation of takotsubo syndrome (TTS) mimics acute coronary syndrome (ACS) and does not allow differentiation. We aimed to develop a clinical score to estimate the probability of TTS and to distinguish TTS from ACS in the acute stage. METHODS AND RESULTS Patients with TTS were recruited from the International Takotsubo Registry ( www.takotsubo-registry.com) and ACS patients f...

Groups of human subjects were exposed for 8 or 24 h to an octave-band noise centered at 63, 125, or 250 Hz. For a 24-h exposure at 84 dBA, temporary threshold shifts (TTS) increased for 8-12 h and then either decreased or remained constant. Although TTS was less than 20 dB, complete recovery for many of the subjects required as long as 48 h. Accordingly, the higher level exposure which was plan...

This paper introduces a Syllable HMM based Mandarin TTS system. 10-state left-to-right HMMs are used to model each syllable. We leverage the corpus and the front end of a concatenative TTS system to build the Syllable HMM based TTS system. Furthermore, we utilize the unique consonant/vowel structure of Mandarin syllable to improve the voiced/unvoiced decision of HMM states. Evaluation results s...