This is the first book to treat two areas of speech synthesis: natural language processing and the inherent problems it presents for speech synthesis; and digital signal processing, with an emphasis on the concatenative approach. The text guides the reader through the material in a step-by-step easy-to-follow way. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in phonetics and speech communication, in both academia and industry.

Text-to-Speech Synthesis provides a complete, end-to-end account of the process of generating speech by computer. Giving an in-depth explanation of all aspects of current speech synthesis technology, it assumes no specialised prior knowledge. Introductory chapters on linguistics, phonetics, signal processing and speech signals lay the foundation, with subsequent material explaining how this knowledge is put to use in building practical systems that generate speech. Including coverage of the very latest techniques such as unit selection, hidden Markov model synthesis, and statistical text analysis, explanations of the more traditional techniques such as format synthesis and synthesis by rule are also provided. Weaving together the various strands of this multidisciplinary field, the book is designed for graduate students in electrical engineering, computer science, and linguistics. It is also an ideal reference for practitioners in the fields of human communication interaction and telephony.

For a machine to convert text into sounds that humans can understand as speech requires an enormous range of components, from abstract analysis of discourse structure to synthesis and modulation of the acoustic output. Work in the field is thus inherently interdisciplinary, involving linguistics, computer science, acoustics, and psychology. This collection of articles by leading researchers in each of the fields involved in text-to-speech synthesis provides a picture of recent work in laboratories throughout the world and of the problems and challenges that remain. By providing samples of synthesized speech as well as video demonstrations for several of the synthesizers discussed, the book will also allow the reader to judge what all the work adds up to -- that is, how good is the synthetic speech we can now produce? Topics covered include: Signal processing and source modeling Linguistic analysis Articulatory synthesis and visual speech Concatenative synthesis and automated segmentation Prosodic analysis of natural speech Synthesis of prosody Evaluation and perception Systems and applications.

Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis: The Bell Labs Approach is the first monograph-length description of the Bell Labs work on multilingual text-to-speech synthesis. Every important aspect of the system is described, including text analysis, segmental timing, intonation and synthesis. There is also a discussion of evaluation methodologies, as well as a chapter outlining some future areas of research. While the book focuses on the Bell Labs approach to the various problems of converting from text into speech, other approaches are discussed and compared. Thus, this book serves both the function of providing a single reference to an important strand of research in multilingual synthesis, while at the same time providing a source of information on current trends in the field. Chapters in this work were contributed by Richard Sproat, Jan van Santen, Bernd Möbius, Chilin Shih, Joseph Olive, Evelyne Tzoukermann, all of Bell Labs, and Kazuaki Maeda of the University of Pennsylvania.

Provides the reader with a practical introduction to the wide range of important concepts that comprise the field of digital speech processing. Students of speech research and researchers working in the field can use this as a reference guide.

Tanja Schultz and Katrin Kirchhoff have compiled a comprehensive overview of speech processing from a multilingual perspective. By taking this all-inclusive approach to speech processing, the editors have included theories, algorithms, and techniques that are required to support spoken input and output in a large variety of languages. Multilingual Speech Processing presents a comprehensive introduction to research problems and solutions, both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, and highlights technology that incorporates the increasing necessity for multilingual applications in our global community. Current challenges of speech processing and the feasibility of sharing data and system components across different languages guide contributors in their discussions of trends, prognoses and open research issues. This includes automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis, but also speech-to-speech translation, dialog systems, automatic language identification, and handling non-native speech. The book is complemented by an overview of multilingual resources, important research trends, and actual speech processing systems that are being deployed in multilingual human-human and human-machine interfaces. Researchers and developers in industry and academia with different backgrounds but a common interest in multilingual speech processing will find an excellent overview of research problems and solutions detailed from theoretical and practical perspectives. - State-of-the-art research with a global perspective by authors from the USA, Asia, Europe, and South Africa - The only comprehensive introduction to multilingual speech processing currently available - Detailed presentation of technological advances integral to security, financial, cellular and commercial applications