

In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech. The back-end-often referred to as the synthesizer-then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. Problems playing this file? See media help.Ī text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end.

Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1990s.Ī synthetic voice announcing an arriving train in Sweden. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on a home computer. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. The reverse process is speech recognition. A text-to-speech ( TTS) system converts normal language text into speech other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.

#SPEECH TIMER FOR YOUR COMPUTER SOFTWARE#
A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech computer or speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech.
