A FORMANT SPEECH SPEECH SYNTHESIZER WHICH ACCEPTS PHONEMIC INPUT
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Donald FISK, Associate Consultant, Electronic Services Division,
45 Hoi Yuen Road, Kwun Tong, Hong Kong. Abstract ======== A
prototype of a serial formant speech synthesizer, with a side
branch for fricative noise, has been developed. Vowels,
nasalized vowels, nasals, plosives, fricatives, approximants,
laterals and trills are handled and so the synthesizer can be
used for most of the world's major languages. It produces
intelligible and natural sounding speech from input based on the
International Phonetic Alphabet. Spectra of natural and
synthesized speech are given for comparison (Appendix IV).
Introduction ============ For many computer speech applications,
the words to be spoken are sufficiently few, all of which are
known in advance, so that they can simply be recorded and played
back when needed. Depending on the number of words, different
degrees of compression are appropri