In this paper we present a concept for a wide-ranging indoor navigation support for the blind and people with impaired vision. Parts of this work were realized within a new prototype of an indoor navigation and object identification system for the blind. With the previous orientation assistant it is possible for blind persons to orientate themselves and to detect objects within modeled indoor e...

In this paper, we present a new approach for the speech synthesis, in which speech utterances are synthesized using the parameters of spectro-modeling function (Multiple function). With this approach, only harmonic-parts are extracted from the phoneme spectrum, and the time-varying spectrum corresponding to the harmonics or sinusoidal components is modeled using the Multiple function. We introd...

By means of a pair comparison test, preferences of German native speakers for English or German sounds in spoken anglicisms were investigated. The collected data can be used as a reference point, which of the English xenophones have to be integrated into a German TTS system to allow for an appropriate pronunciation of anglicisms in German.

In most languages, the quality of a speech synthesis system relates directly to the diversity of language domain. Each domain, such as sports, entertainments, etc., has its specific grammar structures. The grammar structure plays as an important role for analyzing the prosodic information of utterances in each domain. In this research, we will analyze characteristics of prosodic information of ...

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Speech Synthesizers have traditionally been built on carefully read speech that is recorded in studio environment. Such voices are suboptimal for use in noisy conditions, which is inevitable in a majority of deployed speech systems. In this work, we attempt to modify the output of the speech synthesizers to make it more appropriate for noisy environments. Comparison of spectral and prosodic fea...

During interpersonal conversation, both children and adults adapt the basic acoustic-prosodic features of their speech to converge with those of their conversational partner. In this study, 7-to-10year-old children interacted with a conversational interface in which animated characters used text-to-speech output (TTS) to answer questions about marine biology. Analysis of children’s speech to di...